I met some friends in a little town called Hirota to make mochi. Mochi is a Japanese dessert made by heating rice while beating it with a mallet. Apparently this breaks the starches down into sugars. Mochi is very sweet and very sticky. Sometimes they eat it in soup, which I find terrible. It gets slimy when wet. The Japanese people are a wonderful family called the Kamiokas. They have little parties for foreigners every now and then, and always overfeed us.