Day 23 - Nigel tries to eat 24 plates of salmon...

As you will have heard, Peter has been attending conferences which appear to be massively catered affairs here and so he never wastes an opportunity to rub my nose in it. 

“Oh Nigel, how lucky of you to find a half a peanut butter sandwich in the back seat of the car for your breakfast, I had to make do with 48 eggs and half a pig on a three foot hash-brown!”

“Oh you had a muesli bar for lunch?  I could only dream of something so simple, we had to eat the native dish of every country in the northern hemisphere and by the time they got to Turkmenistan I couldn't face another goat!”

So tonight, with Pete invited out to some fancy-pants dinner that no doubt consisted of 48 courses of main, ten courses of dessert and three courses of dancing girls, I figured that I was overdue for a little gastronomical extravagance.

I made my way into town and after a heated three-way argument between my mouth, my stomach and my desperately clogged arteries I finally settled on a small Japanese restaurant named, Akita, and as luck would have it, tonight was their monthly all-you-can-eat buffet for $19.99.

I love Japanese food and in Wellington one of our favourite restaurants is “Catch Sushi”, a small Kaiten-zushi bar where the food comes by you on a conveyor belt and you grab whatever you want.  When we first returned to live in New Zealand we took our children, then five, and before we had time to duct tape Declan’s hands to his chair he had already eaten his way through $40 work of salmon.

He was only 25kg at the time, now I’m - shall we generously say – around three times that weight, so I figured I was hardly a man if I couldn’t eat my way through three times as much salmon as him ($120 worth if you are struggling with the math).  Plus that would see me $100.01 in the black!

Of course I figured I couldn’t just keep asking for salmon sashimi every time the waiter showed himself, as I assumed it was like a casino where if you win too many times in a row they take you out the back and rough you up, so I ensured that I was quite cunning about it.  “Unagi, tofu and two plates of salmon sashimi”, “A glass of water, please, and two plates of salmon sashimi”, “My compliments to the chef and two plates of salmon sashimi”.

Unfortunately after about a dozen rounds of this they started to see through my clever ruse and escalated their own sneaky policy of salmon deprivation.  “Did you know, sir, that our chicken teriyaki is quite well spoken of”. 

Ha, chicken! What kind of a fool do you take me for?  Chicken sells for $8/kilo here, I couldn’t break even on that if I used it to re-tread my car. 

“Or the beef tataki, sir, apparently it is to die for” 

Beef?  Have you ever seen how a Japanese sushi chef gets up before five every morning to get to the market?  No? Well nor have I as that’s about three hours away from anything I would call sane, but I'm pretty sure he only does it so he can great deal on the arse-end of tuna and a sackful of salmon.  If he wanted beef, he’d just swing by Texas on his way to work and grab a longhorn.

I was still only half way through my challenge when they even tried to started to tell me about their range of ice cream flavours.  And the serving sizes kept getting smaller and smaller until the salmon bits were too tiny to pick up with my chopsticks and I had to request two toothpicks and a magnifying glass.

By this point, however, I had devoured 16 plates of sushi along with forty “ruse” plates and I felt a lot like that time I was a kid and tried to generate the world’s biggest burp by wrapping my lips around the soda stream gas nozzle and sucking until my eyeballs started to bulge.  So with a heavy heart I summoned the waiter to order my dessert, “Green tea ice cream and two plates of salmon sashimi”, I whimpered.

As I left I checked my score on the bill.  18 plates of salmon sashimi that they normally sell for $5 each. Hmmm, don’t tell Declan that he has me on this one.

P.S. Here's some more squirrels for Aliya and DJ: