I went to bed and woke up in a daze, not wanting to go outside.
Under the window of the room facing the main street, I see a group of adventurers carrying spears walking leisurely with their horseless carriages.
I wondered if the farmers had already left and the only people coming and going were adventurers and cargo men.
I sat in my chair, staring blankly down, not drinking water or smoking.
My right hand, which normally would have moved over the notepad on its own accord, was somehow not moving today.
In the end, I didn’t even touch my mechanical harp that day and after paying the inn’s receptionist for an extension, I crawled back into the bed.
In the back of my ear, I heard the rant of a woman who I broke up with, “What is it that you really want to sing about?”.
-0-
After two days in bed, I no longer wanted to touch the mechanical harp.
As the woman I dated for three years has said, there was nothing I wanted to sing.
I no longer wanted to touch music itself.
I was never interested in other people enough to want to sing.
The joy of singing and entertaining others should have been the only thing that sustained me but somehow, I seemed to have even dropped lower along the way.
Grrrr, my stomach rambled.
I hadn’t eaten for a whole day, so of course I would be hungry.
I paid for another day’s stay at the reception and asked for a recommendation for a place to eat.
「I’d recommend, the udon store next door.」
「Udon?」
「It’s a local specialty along with pepperoncino.」
「Ah, I’ve heard of pepperoncino. It’s a long thin dish, right?」
「Right right, udon is also long and thin」
-0-
Eating local specialties is important.
I did as the receptionist told me and went into the restaurant right next to the inn.
「Welcome, come in!」
I sat down on a seat pointed by the owner with cropped sideburns and looked around. However, all I could see on the wall was the word “udon” and the price.
It seems like this restaurant specializes in udon.
「Wait!」
Without ordering, I was served with food, perhaps because there was only one dish.
A bowl full of amber colored soup was filled with pure white udon noodles.
I twirled it with a fork and pulled it up, lifting it like long strings.
How am I supposed to eat this?
I have eaten many strange tasting local dishes before but this is the first time I have had a local dish that I don’t know how to eat.
I tried to eat it but most of it kept sticking out of my mouth, making it difficult to eat.
「Customer-san, is this your first time eating udon?」
「Ah, yeah……」
I noticed that the owner of the restaurant was standing behind me with his arms crossed.
「Udon is eaten by sucking it all the way.」
The owner pouted his lips and brought two fingers to his mouth. Then, he put his two fingers to his sticking out lips.
I’m not sure if I want to do what he’s doing……
「Try it like this, like sucking through a straw」
「Understood, got it……」
I scooped the udon again with my fork and sucked it into my mouth like sucking a straw, not because I was pressured by the owner who brought his face close to mine while pouting his lips.
The udon noodles that I sucked into my mouth were slippery on the tongue and had a subtle fishy aroma.
「Suck it and eat it. The broth gets mixed in while doing that. Delicious, right?」
「This soup stock, is it fish?」
「Yes! We make our soup stock from dried gehageha. It’s tasty when it’s soaked, don’t you agree?」
「Yeah～」
It’s not the kind of food that gives you a strong reaction but it’s indeed tasty.
I slowly enjoyed my bowl of udon though I could not get used to sucking it. After that, I went around the city.
Perhaps it’s because I had eaten but my depressed mood had recovered a little.
I still have a little money left.
I t would not be too late to think about what I would do tomorrow after I had looked around the city where I would live.
-0-
I walked around the city until it turned red in the evening sun. I realized that this City of Torquiva was a strange place.
The people in the city were wearing clothes that were three times behind the latest trend in the royal capital while some adventurers were so state of the art that one would have suspected if they had been appropriated by the military.
In the theater, new plays were being performed that I had seen two years earlier in western cities but there was a plethora of food that I had never seen elsewhere. Baseball was all the rage too.
The same is true of the musical instruments used by bards and bands. The six stringed harp(guitar) which was only distributed on a small scale in the west is not only distributed but even produced on a small scale here.
It’s a rural city inhabited by farmers but some of the culture here is strangely sophisticated.
