Speakers: John Daub (Host), Cody (Guest)

00:08 John Daub: How you doing everybody? This is Akita in Tohoku. This is a ramen shop and this is Cody and we're eating ramen. It's not quite midnight but it's getting there. What is great about this ramen shop here? What is this place called?

00:32 Cody: So this place is called Suikido and it's one of the probably the most famous ramen franchises here in Akita. When you ask ramen fan likes what ramen shop to go to if they're in Akita, nine times out of ten they'll tell you this place.

00:46 John Daub: This place? Yeah, usually open 24 hours a day but due to corona they have some shortened business hours but still open till 2 a.m. So good place to grab some food after you get out of your drinks. This place is open till 2 a.m. but we're here at like around 10:30 because we got to get some sleep tomorrow morning. Let me show you a dish. So I'm going to show you the ramen but I want to talk about the ramen. Let me show you a dish here.

01:19 Cody: Check this out. This what is this here? This is a fried rice with um just like they use the ramen stock in this fried rice. And a little bit of the shōhin which is the seasoning. Oh the tare seasoning is in there too.

01:39 John Daub: All right, let's break this open here. Three, two, one. Oh look at this.

01:55 Cody: Getting deep. Look at that.

02:04 John Daub: That's beyond ramen. This is rice dish because we've been eating it. And before I eat take a bite of this I want to show you this ramen here. I've actually eaten the noodles because I was so hungry I couldn't wait for you. Look at the meat here. It's really thinly sliced but I want you to notice something on the top. Maybe you see it. There's a lot of oil on this.

02:31 John Daub: And the reason why is it's considered the hottest in Canada. Temperature wise the hottest ramen like that because the hot oil encapsulates the heat below. Right. I talked about this in Asahikawa at the ramen there. But in colder temperature places they put a lot of oil because it keeps it hotter longer. And it's also really good for you in a way. You know we need the essential oils in the winter. Right Shane?

02:55 Cody: Up there deep in Canada.

03:06 John Daub: This is probably one of the best fried rice dishes I've had in a ramen shop.

03:23 Cody: We call this chahan, right?

03:25 John Daub: Chahan.

03:28 Cody: I think up north they call it ikimishi. Which is like grilled rice.

03:46 John Daub: I'm in paradise right now.

03:58 Cody: How much was this? This was 800 yen?

04:02 John Daub: Yeah 800 yen for the ramen and then 410 for the fried rice. So under 15 dollars for a pretty hefty meal.

04:16 Cody: Yeah that's a good deal. This is also filled with negi. So what do we put this on top of in the noodles?

04:28 John Daub: Wow.

04:36 John Daub: So in about two minutes from now we're going to leave the restaurant because it's getting full. You don't come into a ramen restaurant to hang out. When you go to eat ramen you get in you get out.

04:49 John Daub: This is Akita. Akita is in the north in Tohoku. And there's a lot of interesting things up here. But the station area at night on a weekday is not one of them.

05:12 John Daub: What other famous ramen shops are here?

05:17 Cody: So a lot of the famous ramen shops around here serve a niboshi. It's a popular kind of ramen ingredient, soup ingredient that got popularized in the 80s. And so a lot of it, you know, because Akita doesn't have the coast, there is a lot of niboshi to be used.

05:34 John Daub: Niboshi is like sardines. Dried sardines.

05:39 Cody: There's a complexity to the broth here in Tohoku. They add other like really unique ingredients. But 30, 40 years ago the ramen was different.

05:58 John Daub: Yeah.

06:03 Cody: 30, 40 years ago you had the kind of classic chuka soup which was essentially just like a light pork or chicken stock.

06:11 John Daub: There's so many different kinds of combinations of ramen. The flavor combinations are endless. What you can do with it. Maybe not dessert ramen.

06:20 Cody: Is there a dessert ramen?

06:25 John Daub: I don't think I've ever heard of a dessert ramen, but I'm sure it exists somewhere.

06:45 John Daub: We started the day with noodles. We ended the day with noodles. As any day should be.

07:01 John Daub: Shall we go? Shall we head out?

07:03 Cody: Yep, let's go to the station.

07:11 John Daub: Oh my God. Oh my God. Good to see you. We earned some stuff. Thank you, too. Alright. Welcome to Akita. It is like 10:30, and let me show you back here. This is the shop that we just ate in.

07:58 John Daub: It's not too far off from what I usually do. You eat this like every day?

08:04 Cody: Yeah, I mean, I probably eat ramen like six, seven times a week.

08:11 John Daub: Check out his Instagram. It's ramen guy Japan. Definitely. I've been tagging him in the story. So are you going to see like pictures of ramen? We won't see soba, right?

08:22 Cody: We'll see ramen.

08:23 John Daub: Yeah, just ramen. I'll post some like other gourmet items on my story. But for my feet, it will be mostly ramen. Mostly ramen. Here's the one of the extent about the extent of the nightlife here in Akita.

08:48 Cody: Yeah, I mean, this is like it's been open since Showa Jusannen. Showa 13, which is like right before the war.

08:57 John Daub: Yeah, so it'd be about before World War Two for I want to say like 80 years. Whoa.

09:08 Cody: So yeah, it's definitely one of the oldest ramen shops as well. Yeah, the one that I saw on Asahikawa was opened up early Showa. But the first ramen shop was in Asakusa.

09:18 John Daub: Yeah, in the early, early 1900s, right? It was a place called Rai-ra Ike and they actually opened a new version of it in the ramen museum in Shin-Yokohama.

09:36 John Daub: Long history of ramen throughout Japan, Akita included. And yeah, if you're ever in the Akita area, I definitely recommend coming to Suikido. That place with the yellow sign, I almost said kanban, which is sign in Japanese.

09:58 John Daub: So good. So good. That fried rice. I've never had anything like it, Cody. That fried rice was legendary.

10:01 Cody: I mean, that's a pretty common side dish to have in ramen shops. A lot of old school places will definitely serve it on the menu. Because of the Chinese roots of ramen. But yeah, that's probably one of the better, if not one of the best chahan that I've had as a set with my ramen.

10:20 John Daub: Ah, I'm eating too many noodles. Every time I took a step right there, something was sloshing in my stomach.

10:28 Cody: The great feeling of having noodles in your stomach.

10:31 John Daub: And it's really been there for a long time. It's really changed too much over the years, but this above ground walkway is sort of semi new, right?

10:42 Cody: I think so. The last time I came to Akita has been a while now, probably like over five years and I really don't remember this being here.

10:53 John Daub: Akita gets a ton of snow in the winter. So I'm guessing that, you know, this is very useful between now and April when the snows are all here and this is all covered in white stuff or slush. But today it's chilly but not too cold. Yeah, I mean, Akita does their best to make sure people stay warm. I compare it to kind of like the northern European countries where a lot of stores even have the glass outer room before you enter the actual store so the cold air doesn't go straight into the store.

11:27 Cody: Oh yeah, Hokkaido does that too. They have like a double doors and the convenience stores right, you go in and they close it off and have wind blockers.

11:39 John Daub: And I think pretty sure a lot of northern European houses have that. A lot of places where it's cold for a considerable amount of the year, so yeah, it's one of the things that helps keep the people of Akita warm.

11:51 John Daub: Alright, there are the bus, that's where you pick up the buses here. Public transportation is few and far between but it's not too bad out of the city, right? I want to go here and check out on top of the mailbox. This is you always find this in front of the stations they'll have some sort of like theme for the postal service. And this one here is the festival. I guess you have like a chochin here. What is that? Some sort of that resemble the—yeah, I know it's a chochin but is it like the Kanto Festival?

12:34 John Daub: They got a light. Oh, it's a Kanto Festival. Yeah, that's the Kanto Festival. What they do is they balance—do you see this dude on a pole? He's balancing all these lights on a pole. It's one of the most amazing festivals in the summer. You get that here in Akita and you're gonna see little teeny symbols of the city of Akita all over. Walking around the station front. Of course you see the Tohoku and the Akita Shinkansen right there. That's the red one. Right here, what is that? The E7? Is that the one that we caught today?

13:02 Cody: Yeah, at Morioka the green one goes up to Aomori and this one goes towards Akita, the red one, but in Tokyo they're kissing.

13:27 John Daub: Yeah, lovely. I guess we could go into the station. All right, let's take I'm just gonna take a quick detour to the station for about a minute. Yeah, it is pretty cool now. It's about between three and five degrees Celsius which is upper 30s lower 40s right now. Dizzellas, welcome Andrew from Fort Wayne. Love with that ramen. And Eddie was here from Holland. And Ed Joseph, yes, you are here for a midnight snack run.

13:56 John Daub: We've kind of had the snack now, we're just doing the run. Um, wow, that's a big Starbucks right there. And this is the walkway that we just passed. It's a lot warmer inside of here. And yeah, this is definitely new. This wasn't here before. I think you would exit here and you'd be outside on an above ground walkway but it wasn't covered, and now that it's covered it makes it easier. And people just want to sit in the same lane, they don't know how to want to spend more money. I think inside of the JR station which is—hey, not a bad thing.

14:32 John Daub: Just kind of give you an idea, right now the station's under construction and I believe all of this white wall. I don't think that was here, it was really kind of a big hallway last time I was here a couple of years ago. But you know, stations in Japan are always changing, right? Always changing.

15:10 John Daub: You know these Starbucks out in the countryside of Japan are like date spots. It's like a date spot. You know it's funny in a lot of these countryside areas they have these dates where they go to bookstores. I know because the bookstores are huge and they're typically connected to a cafe, so these people go around looking at books that they may or may not want to buy, have a coffee in hand, and that's essentially a date.

15:41 Cody: In the United States?

15:42 John Daub: Oh yeah, countryside. I like that though. That's kind of romantic. You know, in the city there's too many things. If you're a guy you're gonna end up spending 10 times more money. That's how I'm looking at it.

16:02 John Daub: This is nice up here. So what do you want to do Cody? You can go back to the hotel or you can keep on walking. I'm going to walk for a little bit longer and show some of the station area of Akita here.

16:12 Cody: Sure, I guess we have another full day of ramen ahead of us tomorrow.

16:16 John Daub: Indeed. I guess I'll let you do your thing. Okay, um, so here's the station right here. This is the shinkansen tracks. We were—where's the ramen place? It's right there, right? Yes, we're here and then we're facing this way, right? So the ramen shop is right along this main road right before this intersection, so right around here.

16:40 John Daub: All right, okay, right there. And I'm going to take you around this area which seems to be a little bit built up. Apparently there's not a lot on this side of the station, everything's in the front here. And a little story: I actually camped in a park around here when I was hitchhiking back in 2017. And so and Patreon supporters probably got a I did a Q&A just right outside here three years ago.

17:02 John Daub: Alright Cody, thanks for having some ramen with me. I always said sushi anytime. Yeah, we need another ramen guide. You'll know where to find me. All right, I'll see you in the morning. What time are we leaving? Like like eight? Um, I think we're meeting downstairs at eight. Yeah, okay, I'll probably see you at breakfast time. And then okay, I'll see you then. Ramen. That's the spirit.

17:30 John Daub: I've actually had every meal was noodle dish for the last 48 hours. It's gotten somewhat insane. It's been a lot of fun hanging out with Cody and getting a more intimate look at noodles because his knowledge of noodles and noodle history is far superior than my own.

17:45 John Daub: All right, this is such an amazing place. But check it out outside the window here in Akita—there's like nobody. It looks like Shinjuku the size of Shinjuku. Like it's just pretty massive some of the buildings here and there's nobody out there. So let's get down there, let's walk the streets, take it to the streets. I've been having a lot of fun on this tour. It's nice to get out.

18:20 John Daub: And the situation in this area of Japan is a lot different but we've been taking our temperatures. I've told this a few times, we have been taking our temperatures for the last month at least I have. And that's the hotel we're staying in the hotel metropolis, I think it's called. It's pretty nice, got a view from up there. I think—oh, that's not my light, on a view of the station which is kind of neat.

18:52 John Daub: But you're right, it is really empty. Check it out, we're up here on the top this shotengai, which is a covered street. The shotengai goes down about 200 meters but there really isn't anything open and it's so quiet. Even if you can believe it or not, that 7-Eleven is closed. That's kind of eerie.

19:05 John Daub: Hey Tech 19, welcome traveler. So this is the walkway going to Akita station and now we're gonna go down the steps here. Just Tex Shonen's in the house, how you doing Tex?

19:28 John Daub: John is walking through a kind of zombie apocalypse town, Akita after 10 p.m. Akita City, this is the prefectural capital of Akita prefecture and we're here just to spend the night and then onwards and upwards to Aomori tomorrow. That's so weird that a 7-Eleven is closed. I don't think it's covered. That is shutting this out down. I think it's like this every Tuesday. I'm gonna be honest with you, Akita on a weekday, people go home. Not a lot of people are living you know center of the city. A lot of people are spread out around the suburbs here.

20:08 John Daub: Um, we do have manhole covers and what what this design is here. Let's see if I can get this right. These are the lights for the Kanto Festival. And again, if you're in summer in August, Akita is one of the most popular one of the big places to come for festivals. Aomori has Nebuta Festival, Akita has the Kanto Festival. And I have never been to the Kanto Festival.

20:33 John Daub: The other thing you're going to see all over Akita is this—do you see Hachiko or the Akita Inu? It's just represented in like so many so many signs and artworks. And then you have the demons which is famous for the oni for bath and he looks like he has an onsen bucket getting ready to go to the onsen. That hot spring water coming from the earth deep down. Okay, just over there, that's where we had the ramen. Across this park to that other side. So taking it already on a pretty good tour.

21:20 John Daub: Why is the dog famous? Because Hachiko is—it's a movie, it's the name of the crossing in Shibuya in Tokyo. Hachiko Crossing. And the Akita Inu is a breed here in cold weather and one of those Akita Inu dogs was in Shibuya and it's a pretty good story. In fact Richard Gere played the owner of Hachiko, I believe, in a Hollywood movie version. Right. Somebody asked why is that dog famous. Like how dare you, how do you not know about Hachiko?

22:02 John Daub: I'm looking for those Akita Bijin. Bijin means a beautiful person, beautiful lady. I always say I always call the old ladies bijin, especially if they're at a hotel or at a restaurant owner. You usually get some extra food or an upgrade. So always tell the old lady that they look beautiful and good things happen.

22:31 John Daub: Definitely not a lot of YouTubers come walking around the streets of Akita at night. Social distancing very very easy here. Let's see if the vending machines have anything different than Tokyo.

22:57 John Daub: What's that? Oh there's melon soda, melon cream soda. No thank you, pass. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. Look at that. I don't see anything completely different, do you see anything? Wow, there's some yuzu but we have that in Tokyo so nothing really different here. Although they have this Coca-Cola has its own Akita design. And of course they have the Oga Hanto, ogres, devils, demons. And then Hachiko is on the Coca-Cola bottle. That's helpful.

23:39 John Daub: Well that's nice, we had somebody who's watching the show came out to say hello. So that's about it, that's about it. Here's the center of the city. I'm going to pan now and you can see an izakaya that's sort of buzzing. I think there's a—this is Shirokia which is a national chain but they've done it pretty good. It looks pretty interesting. Lots of colorful signs and prices on it to entice people to go take a quicker look. And then there's Friend Simon and Martina's favorite chain. Oh, that's not it, no no, they used to like that. They have a chain with the same looking sign in Tokyo that we used to go to. This is yakitori center. So this is where they have a lot of yakitori inside of here.

24:44 John Daub: That looks interesting. Shall we walk by there? Why is that some tebasaki, tebasaki or Japanese chicken wings? All right, let's go, let's go the long way around. We're gonna walk past the yakitori center, maybe take a whiff or two, put ourselves into chicken paradise. It's pretty nice.

25:00 John Daub: We started this live stream with a bowl of ramen and in my mask all I smell is fried rice and ramen. It's a torture right now. The layer of fat is pretty thick. All right, let's cross the street here. I can't believe there's like no cars, it's so quiet.

25:51 John Daub: Packabros, welcome new member new traveler. And Tex Shonen, thanks, nice to see you. Akita, new hotel, a view hotel, you hotel. I like everyone's got that Christmas spirit. All right, let's go check out that let's go check out the Akita the um there are a lot of hotels here. The one we're staying in is really nice and again tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. we're getting on.

26:16 John Daub: Oh I gotta I gotta tell you about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So tomorrow morning we're getting on to a very nice train going up to Akita to Aomori. And I think we get a chance to live stream on this really really nice train. I've kind of worked out a deal. I think we won't know until tomorrow morning if we could do it but I want to bring you like on this whole trip I wanted to bring you to Tohoku with me to share a little bit of Tohoku because of the JR East Welcome Rail Pass, the 2020 rail pass that they're offering to foreign residents of Japan. If you have a non-Japanese passport you can get this pass for 12,000 yen and come up here and explore for three days consecutive. It's like the best best best deal ever.

27:04 Cody: Wow, for that that is so cheap. All you can drink for twelve dollars.

27:12 John Daub: All you can drink for twelve dollars and for another five dollars you can add on another hour. And then you can put your necktie on your head. Let's say it sounds like two battling one another with two different speakers.

27:28 John Daub: Only in Akita. That's all you can drink and eat for a thousand yen. That can't be true.

27:40 John Daub: Here's the yakitori center right here and you can see they have here one drink is two dollars 209 yen and you can get Asahi beer too in there. That's actually a really darn good deal. And we have tebasaki which is Japanese chicken wings and it's actually not so you get discounted tickets to eat inside of there. But there's not a lot of people so I kind of feel bad.

28:13 John Daub: Some said the signal's cutting in and out. How's the signal now? Do you see it? See, okay, Joy says it's okay, thanks. All right, I can take you inside of this this Lawson's. A little bit, let's see if we can find something to get something to drink or something. Okay, well it's a lot of space in here. Oh there's a yakisoba pond. I don't know how they put noodles and bread, it's kind of weird. Well you can get just potatoes. That's awesome. That's a strange—it's kind of spicy, I think. But nothing I see. People said there's been some buffering. Really? Hey, Chicago African. All right, we'll see what we can find. Um, it's buffering so I left. I saw a comment, oh sorry, I figured out what was wrong with the live stream. I figured out what was wrong with the live stream. I forgot to turn the Wi-Fi off and it was automatically connected to the Docomo free Wi-Fi which is really not that strong. The 4G is a lot better. So sorry about that. You always turn off the 4G when you do live streaming. I really apologize. Probably when I was walking inside of there the 4G was on, I said the Wi-Fi was on. Yeah, that's interesting.

31:50 John Daub: This is some kind of doing some kind of construction here. Oh I'm so sorry. So a lot of people are saying that the signal was bad probably because of the Docomo. Man, I gotta remember to turn off the Wi-Fi. Just kind of drunk people walking around. It's not really some business people on the left side and that's Akita Broadcasting, ABS, Akita Broadcasting which is a TV station with that blue tower. And then you have the KEEP the station right there on the left side not coming into the center.

32:38 John Daub: So this is the station area. As it's nice, you know, it's not too bad. Um, there wasn't any special beers, no special foods at that Lawson. So kind of disappointing. No, there's no special things in the vending machines really. I thought except for the Akita Coca-Cola label there's nothing really new. But one thing that I noticed half of the vending machine is like heated. Right, so they already have the hot stuff like heated corn soup with butter. That's really looking good right now actually. So the temperature is starting to drop below zero. It's getting pretty chilly.

33:22 John Daub: So I'm gonna probably head in in a minute. There's nobody around but I wanted to say to you that tomorrow morning I intend to do a live stream on a train. I want to do a live stream on a train. So it's going to be cool. You know, I've been riding the trains for the last few weeks and I haven't brought a live stream on a train really. So we're going to try to remedy that tomorrow. And we're leaving it around 8 a.m. So we'll see what we can do with that.

33:45 John Daub: I can't believe they still have the phone booths. They're getting harder and harder to get in and out of the train. So I'm gonna try to find the phone booths in Tokyo. But you can still see them out here, the green ones. And when I was—oh this is the bigger one. So you can if you're in a wheelchair you can get inside of it. I like the fact that they do these. Or if you have kids or something. That's a nice little thing that the cities were doing more and more and they can do a lot more for making the city more accessible, I think.

34:10 John Daub: But I think that's another reason why you see this construction going on all over the country. They're making it more accessible, more ramps, more elevators, wider ticket booths, wider ticket turnstiles to get through. So if you're getting on a wheelchair, I think maybe in the future you can just wheel everywhere around here and not have to receive any help at all. That would be actually a really good thing and we're getting there. I'm glad for that.

34:48 John Daub: I think the Paralympics has done a lot to—even though the Olympics were cancelled or suspended this year, it's done a lot to raise awareness on how inaccessible Tokyo was for people who had disabilities. So that's a good thing. I drank at the Starbucks when I was hitchhiking. I sat here in the morning eating a scone or whatever, waiting for my train to go to Oga Hanto, going going up north to catch my next ride. I couldn't hitchhike from the train station. So wow, it hasn't changed at all. There's still some people in there.

35:39 John Daub: Oh that's awesome, it's like a blast from the past. I think the last time I was here was three years ago, actually. Oh my god, which is where the fireworks festival is. Oh my god, where the fireworks festival is one station on the shinkansen away from here, but we didn't come to Akita city. Those four dudes are drunk. They know how to drink around here, which is really cool. Having a good time. Just keep your mess on social distancing. They're like hugging each other. Totally plowed.

36:05 John Daub: All right folks, so we started off with eating ramen and fried rice. If you missed that, go back into the playback and check out the most delicious fried rice that I've ever had in my entire life. They use the ramen stock in the fried rice to add some sort of richness to it. But more than that, they put on top of it an egg, a raw egg, and you break the egg and it gets all beautifully orange on top of it. It's such an amazing richness to an already pretty thick rice. So this is Akita station. Fatima, you had to be there. It's not just an egg, it's an egg. It's so slightly different. It's hard to put intonation in capital letters, you know what I mean?

37:12 John Daub: That's the West exit. There really isn't that much more to show you even for snacks and stuff. I think we're limited to like a convenience store too. I'm guessing that the train live stream is going to be in the morning, it's somewhere but sometime between 8 and 10 a.m. So yeah, the live stream tomorrow sometime between 8 and 10 a.m. And I might if the time allows, live stream at a ramen shop tomorrow. We have access to film at a delicious ramen shop in Aomori city that is very unique. And I'm looking forward to this. I'm actually filming this for the first time in a while so I'm going to be there in about a week or so and I hope to make on noodles. Just ramen.

38:02 John Daub: We've been pretty thorough from Morioka to Akita and now to Aomori. And it's all three prefectures, we've hit in the last three days. Three prefectures, three days. That's fun. Traveling is fun again, sort of. We got to take more precautions, masks, take our temperature, distance, when we're eating we have partitions or we try to stay away at that last restaurant. I hope that's what you're hoping for.

38:25 John Daub: I think it's the one thing that gives us all the greatest worry is when people eat, they do talk, including me, and I'm guilty of that too. It's something that we have to think a lot about. So most restaurants have windows open and they try to get as much fresh air into the restaurants as possible, which I think is a good thing. But you can't get rid of the risk over 2020 but you can try to find ways to make it a little bit better. Keep the risk down and keep the economy going because if they don't have these shops open, they're all going to go out of business. And we've seen what happened in Akihabara with so many businesses closing. I don't want to see that happening here in Akita or any other regional place.

39:14 John Daub: All we can do is really try to do our best to protect everybody else around us and social distance and only do live streams in the middle of the night or something like. I don't know, but it's nice to leave Tokyo and come out here and see a really beautiful— what is that burger? Wait a second. Gochisou. So wide, oh look at how big that burger is. What? Hey, and guess what? Freshness Burger just got a Kobe beef burger. Actually they announced it's coming on the 25th, so next week. I might go check out their poochie small sized Kobe beef burger for ten dollars.

39:52 John Daub: How small is it? And does it taste good? Just because it says Kobe beef doesn't mean that it's going to be something that's really special. It could be just an average tasting burger. I think wagyu beef sells and gets people to pay a little bit more but it's too much fat in it and I'd rather have it as a steak, to be honest with you. I don't think it works as well as a burger. Wagyu works great as a steak or shabu-shabu, not so much as a burger. And usually for burgers they're using not A5, A4, they're using a lower grade beef with a little bit more fat. So the wagyu is just in there to sell it and upsell the price.

40:42 John Daub: Dang, my mask smells like ramen. I'm gonna have to wash this thing. All right, that's what I'm staying for the night everybody. I want to say thanks so much for watching. Oh man, oh ramen. Actually it's not as bad as you think. Hey Fungus USMC, I missed it, go back and eat it again. No, actually maybe no no no diet. Do you see this? I got like three chins now. It's all from noodles. I can't go back, they know me now. I was filming in there, they were actually cool with it. Danny, do you rest a little Danny? I will definitely try to get some rest. I'm gonna sleep well tonight up there in that hotel room. And then tomorrow morning I go back and can I will celebrate with some a nice dinner tomorrow night.

41:43 John Daub: Yeah, it's too chill over here. Hey Slice of Japan was here. Dizzle, us. Wow, I missed a couple. Thanks guys. Tomorrow morning. So that's a shout out for this. Somewhere between 8 and 10 a.m. and I'll give you as much heads up as I possibly can, like 30 to 40 minutes usually. If I do more, then people get angry, I can't wait that long, I'm going to give you thumbs down. That's what they do. It's true. It's not fair. It's true.

42:24 John Daub: It's true. But yeah, I don't know, I'm a little bit tired. It's been on the go. I've been eating way too much. The noodles from the Wanko Soba yesterday was incredibly heavy and I didn't recover. And this morning at the morning market, you know what my first meal was? More noodles. I had more noodles. For lunch we had noodles. We had ramen at Ito Ramen, which is a legendary ramen shop that I filmed.

42:58 John Daub: He wouldn't let us interview him and he doesn't need to. But he is one of the first people that added another ingredient except for like pork bone into it to add more diversity and depth into the flavor. He added a sardine to it and he became really famous like 30 years ago. And when we went in there to film the shop, Cody was really excited because we got access to film because we told him this is for a shoot. From the rail company. And he allowed us in there to shoot. But normally he says no to all media requests. And this time he said yes. And also we called him like six times. Cody was insistent.

43:45 Cody: It was just so complex. Ramen is like that. I prefer udon as a meal, as a noodle. But as a dish, ramen is so complex. Everyone is different. And that's every bowl is different at every different shop. It's just such an amazing meal.

44:25 John Daub: So tomorrow I might do another live stream on a noodle place. So we'll see what happens. Again, I'm trying to film this for edited episodes. It's a little bit better as an edited show than a live stream, but a little bit I could share with you tonight. Go back and watch the playback. If you like, if you want to see some more ramen episodes, click the thumbs up button. I'm going to go inside, guys. It is kind of chilly. Good morning Washington State.

44:50 John Daub: Noodles. No, don't call me noodles. Wasn't that the name of somebody in what is it? Once Upon a Time in America. His name was Noodles. I wasn't like, some mafia movie. Forget nickname. Yeah. Happy birthday to Jotti in Finland. And everybody else, thanks so much for watching. I'll see you. Leave a comment below. This isn't the best live stream in the world. This one was kind of, thank the signal. And the fact that there's like nothing really to show you here. So better just get to sleep. Bye bye from Akita, everybody. Thanks for watching. And I'll see you tomorrow morning with something a little bit more interesting than a station that doesn't have a lot of people.

45:35 John Daub: Although I do love Akita. I do love this place. I wish there were Akita dogs running around. Wouldn't that be better? Like stray dogs. Like a pack of Akita Inu that just roamed around at night, howling and attacking tourists. Now that would make me want to come to Akita. They don't do that. There's no dogs. Dog catcher got them all. Seriously, they need some wild Akita Inu roaming the streets. I would totally, like they would stop and you can go, and then they'd bite you. So I want to see more of that. All right, I'm going inside here. Later. Bye bye.