the physics of air flow and a pot of cold noodles

This is the problem with the off-line blogs, I lost my trail of thoughts, but I will get back to it with a little story and once again a pictureless post.

With one exceptions, my days in Tokyo were pretty long. I would hit the road around 9am and come back around 10-11pm or even later. In the morning I would visit mueseums, galleries or showrooms that would otherwise close by 5-6 usually and in the evening I would hang out where most Tokyo youth would hang out: everywhere. So it is understandable that I would be rather tired at the end of the day.

My hotel was located in Asakusa, a pretty honorable middle-class Tokyo neighborhood, equipped with its share of temples and rather quiet compared with the rest of the city and also quite affordable in terms of hotels.

As I was coming home one evening, I was tempted to have a late supper at one of the local restaurants who looked exactly like what I always imagined an opium den from the Sherlock Holmes stories would look like: hidden behind several curtains there were several small rooms filled with smoke and odors from the shoes gathered at the entrance after a full day of work. Naturally I gathered all my confidence and walked in.

Since I was alone I was directed to the bar - where another Japanese just arrived as well.
Like any respectable local place, the menu was only in Japanese and contained no pictures or explicit graphics. But, lucky me, I pointed suggestively to my neighbor and since Japanese are very quick fellows the order was taken without further incidents. While we waited for the food to arrive, the waiter brought some beer and after a few sips I had to admit that my fellow dinner buddy had good taste in beer so I was hopeful that his taste in food was as good.

Finally the food arrived, it turns out that I had ordered a cold noddle dish which looked very casual, but nevertheless tasted quite good. You dip the noodles in the hot soup that accompanied the noddles and all in all it makes quite a good combination.

So far so good, I was rather happy and ready to enjoy my surprise dinner when it happened.
My neighbor started to eat. To start, his jaws never fully closed while eating resulting in the most noisy chewing that I had ever experienced, more powerful than a sledge-hammer working at full speed and more annoying than the squeak of a door that opens and close 20 times per second. As if this was not enough, his technique of eating the noodles was based entirely on the high-speed airflow from outside of his mouth to the inside resulting also in a symphony that could be easily heard by the emperor in his sound prrof room from his palace 10 miles away;

After only a few seconds I feel the urge to run away and for the first (and last) time in Japan I would have eaten at McDonald's if only to get rid of the sound that unfortunately remained imprinted somewhere in my brain as in stormy nights I can still hear it.

Well, I had to find a compromising solution and one presented itself - bathroom. I went there and flushed the toilet (which almost covered the sounds) until my dinner buddy finished his dinner which fortunately I must say it happened pretty quickly.

He payed and left in a rush and I came back and finish my noddles in silence. It was the perfect ending to a beautiful day.