My encounter with Japanese food

It was a chilly Saturday evening here in Vilnius. In keeping with my long held desire to have a taste of Japanese cuisine; more specifically, the sushi, I went out to dine at a restaurant called Tokyo China. The territorial, economic and military disputes between PRC and Japan notwithstanding, the sushis and the noodles of the world rubbed shoulders on the restaurant menu.
We took our time going through the entire menu, which was full of bright coloured pictures of a variety of dishes. It was time to order then. Since it was our first time, we werent exactly of what to order. All I knew was that I wanted to eat sushi. For the uninitiated and for others who would want to gain conceptual clarity anyways, the sushi is a Japanese dish made of vinegared rice and combined with vegetables / seafood. There are various permutations and combinations with some of them being with eel, tuna, squids,shrimps,salmon etc. We decided to order the tempura yasai maki sushi. To make it simple, tempura yasai is nothing but deep fried battered vegetables and the maki sushi is a form of sushi in which a cylindrical roll of sushi is cut into pieces. To go with it, we also ordered ramen soup.
The sushi came alongwith the wasabi sauce and grated ginger and carrots. Now, the wasabi is something that is experienced more by your nose than your taste buds. It is a root with an extremely strong flavour that kicks you even with the slightest bit of it. If one asks me, I did not exactly take neither to the almost bland sushi nor to the extremeness of the wasabi , all this while struggling to use the chopsticks in the right manner. The ramen soup was just about good with a slightly smoky flavour and with egg which led to me breaking the "rule" the second time in my life according to my mother, that of staying away from anything that is non vegetarian. The first time was when I gorged upon a mcchicken mistaking it for a mcspicy paneer. Well, I had more than one factor to blame for it; the delivery guy who gave me my takeaway, my hunger (coupled with dumbness..some would say), the darkness inside the autorickshaw which made me blind to the non veg sign on the packet. From the episode, I just discovered how indifferent I really was between eating veg and non veg.
Leaving everything aside, the Jap food evening was an interesting one anyways, the key takeaways for me being the taste of the excellent fresh fruit juice, the visual delight offered by the decor of the restaurant and lastly a drive to learn using chopsticks !!