Above is a bowl of some regular-looking somen. Pleasantly cool, easy to eat—your friend in summertime.

To enjoy your noodles, you simply dip them into your tsuyu dipping sauce (usually a mixture of dashi soup stock, soy sauce, mirin and sugar), then quietly slurp them up. You repeat this process until you're done.

But ARuFa realized that, as great as somen may be, it has a key weakness...

... it's WAY too boring!

That's right, slurping on somen is a snoozefest. He propses three reasons for this:

1. All you do is look down.
2. The noodles just follow the line of gravity.
3. There's no sense of motion.

You could probably do this at a funeral without getting kicked out!

But during the summer in Japan there are tons of events like festivals and fireworks that liven things up. If eating somen could capture the same kind of spirit that surrounds Japanese festivals, maybe it wouldn't be so boring.

So, in order to shake things up a bit...

...ARuFa decided to take some action shots of himself slurping somen!

First, he needed to dry the noodles on a hanger. While the sight of drying somen on a hanger might be a little disturbing, all we're doing is making use of somen's tendency to harden when it dries. There's nothing wrong with that, right?