The two of us met in Berlin back in 2016 and have remained fast friends since. He’s visited me once in Hong Kong in 2019, but most of our memories remain in Germany. Back then, we met up at least every other weekend to go cycling, or cook, or do silly things.
We once cycled alongside horse-drawn chariots in southern Berlin, breaded for lunch at a little lakeside hotel, had a few beers, and continued on our journey. We’ve also been on strange trams, scenic ferry rides, and suburban rail journeys to explore Berlin’s umland.
We went to Zeuthener See once in the middle of winter when the swampy ground turned into half-frozen mud. We took a suburban tram to the southeastern limits of Berlin, changed onto a minibus 168 destined for Teikyo University’s Berlin campus, and wandered into the swamp. It turns out that Soichi knew of Teikyo University, it’s a private university in Japan, but he said that it wasn’t a very good one.
He exaggerated that if a candidate could write their name on an exam paper for matriculation, they could probably get an offer to study at Teikyo.
We walked over logs and got ankle-deep in cold mud while we were there. Afterwards, we went over to his place in Adlershof to cook dinner. That night, we had an entire Toblerone cake and a kilo of roast pork belly cut into crispy cubes.
The following week, he offered to teach me how to make proper sushi. The only problem was that Kaufland, one of the largest supermarket chains in Germany, didn’t sell much Asian food. We managed to get some cucumber, pearl rice, sushi vinegar, seaweed, and Kikkoman soy sauce that wasn’t the sushi variety. We really wanted to buy Tamagoyaki and put raw salmon in the sushi, but they didn’t have any of that. The next best thing was to make Tamagoyaki ourselves with raw egg and pan-fried Atlantic salmon fillet.
I finally got to use my bamboo sushi rolling mat and everything worked out perfectly. The sushi looked visually appealing and tasted a little off with European ingredients. After dinner, we each had a bowl of miso soup and a generous glass of sake.
