My "Reception"

That's what my host father called it when he couldn't explain in Japanese. Tonight my host family and I went to a sushi restaurant, but not the kind of sushi restaurant that exists in America.

You sit at a bar or a table and there's a conveyor belt that goes around and around past the bar and all of the tables. There are different kinds of sushi on different colored plates, and if you see something you want you just grab it off the conveyor belt and start eating (or get the chef's attention and ask for something specific if you want to).

You can see the conveyor belt going around the area where the chefs are making all of the sushi.

When you're done and you've had all the green tea you can drink, you can tell one of the chefs (they can multitask!) that you're done. Then, a chef will bring over a scanner. Just when you think he's going to start typing thing in on the scanner, he just scans the stack of plates at the end of your table. The color of the plate corresponds to the price of the item on the plate, so the scanner just picks up the color of he plate and records the price.

The stacks of plates can get pretty big.

THEN when you think you're as amazed as you can be, the chef scans one more sheet of plastic that looks like a thick hotel key card. He hands that to someone at the table. When he scanned the card he put the total price on the card. Then, once you have the card, all you have to do is bring it to the cashier.

I have glimpsed the future.