Bentos on the bullet train

This past weekend, me and my fella got out of the big city and headed off to the FUJIROCK FESTIVAL a three-day extravaganza of music, camping and fun. Friday we packed our new tent, our borrowed sleeping bags, and some gummy bears and headed off to the train.

For the last few years, the home of FUJIROCK has not been at mt. Fuji… but up in the mountains of Nagano, toward Niigata, at the Naeba Ski Resort. The way to get there is by the famous Japanese Shinkansen or Bullet train. We were in one of the double decker MAX version train--- Takes about 1 ½ hours.

What does all this have to do with food and the fancy glass…? Well, one of the most popular and traditional things to do when one is riding the shinkansen is to buy a delicious, popular and traditional Japanese Bento (meal in a box) from Tokyo Station- before boarding, and then eat dinner on the train. So pictured above you can see our meal that started off our great mini vacation weekend.

A note about other FUJIROCK related food… A friend of ours who went to the festival last year was bemoaning the bad and expensive food choices. He told us we should bring a lot of our own food, and I was quite worried about it BUT… Things must have changed a lot since last year cause we found the food at FUJIROCK to be quite good indeed. And Inexpensive.

They had food booths featuring dishes from all over the world, Africa, China, Thailand, America, Britain, France, Spain, --- and most of the best stuff was being offered in booths by independent Restaurant owners. There was the corporate food area, bad pizza and other rock concert fare… but there was also – no lie- a small homemade pizza co. booth where they had a real wood burning pizza oven, that they had brought up the mountain! And it was incredible pizza, some of the best I have had since coming to Japan 9 years ago. Everything was about 500 yen per person! Beer, food, sake, softdrinks, even our Sunday morning British Breakfast of fried eggs, sausages, bread, and bacon. 500 yen!

I didn’t take many pictures of the food as it was raining on us off and on through most of the three days- we had so much fun anyway but my camera stayed nice a dry in a plastic bag in my backpack most of the time. I do have a few shots of music etc. I may put these up on one of my other blogspot areas.

In the meantime, the Bento above featured a nice piece of salmon, steamed rice, tamago yaki, (sweet cooked egg) spinach, seaweed, potatoes, and tempura veggies. YUM! And all for about 8 dollars- which in Japan is good!

I credit our fun and tasty bento with getting our weekend off to such a good start.