New foods and little observations

Whenever I go to the store I buy a treat.  I have rules though.  It has to look completely bizarre, or the wrapper concealing it gives me no idea of what's inside.  I'm always happy when one turns out to be some form of chocolate. So here we go.

The top little one was a green tea flavored chocolate piece.  Pretty good.

The middle one I got because hey!  I didn't know they had Bubblicious out here, and it surprised me.

The bottom one turned out to be hilarious.  I had no idea what it was.  Turned out to be heavily italian seasoned crutons.  I'm not over dramatizing it at all.

Ok these are both about the length of my hand, palm to finger-tip.

The green one turned out to be a looooong cheeto puff.

I thought the red one was perhaps a roll-up strip.  Or at worst a sea-weed strip.  Nope. 

 Twas a squid-strip.

Anywho.  I got a pizza advertizement in my mail today. Here are some translations (more of something for me to practice translating Katakana)

 Side Menu, to name a few:

Chicken Nuggets

Poppin' Chicken

Rice Croquettes with Cheese

Chicken Potato Gratin

Seafood Doria?

Chicken Teriyaki Pizza

Mochi Combo???? (....ack.  Mochi on pizza...there's one thing I will not try)

Egg Carbonara Pizza

(This menu was overwhelming.)

California Combo Pizza (left): bacon, tuna, garlic, mayonnaise, corn, onion, green pepper, Parmesan

Mixed Flavor Pizza: tomato, pepperoni, corn, onion, green pepper, Parmesan

This one looked most tempting to me.  

The Margarita: Mozzarella, Tomato, Fresh Basil, Virgin Olive Oil, Parmesan

(phew.  YOU try to translate バージンオリーブオイル = Ba-jinori-buoiru =Virgin Olive Oil) 

 Anyways.  As I was biking home from the store, I spotted this cute teeny little truck. heh.

I decided to finally get a drink from one of these vending machines.  So I looked for the one that was most out of place.  This guy is in between a vineyard and a garden. What...the crap.

You could buy various types of cold coffee, tea, and Coke-a-Cola. No water though, hmmmm. Again, I got something that I had no knowledge about. This is kah-ru-pee-su-uwah-tah = Calpis Water.  Tasha calls it cow piss water.  It didn't taste bad.  It tastes like really watered down, uncarbonated sprite. I decided to look up the ingredients.  3.  Water, dry milk, and fermented lactic acid.  Why is everything here fermented ha ha ha.  I decided to investigate a little further, and poured some into a clear glass.  It looked like very watered down milk.  Interesting, right?  Go water down some sprite, wait for the carbonation to leave, and you'll have basically tried Calpis water.  It's pretty popular here it seems.

 

Here are those Apple Mangos.  Ok.  I know that it SAYS Apple Mango right there under the Japanese.  But 90% of the time the labels don't have English.  And every time I go to the store, it's like a sensory overload explosion, so it is verrrrrry hard to focus on the details.  I honestly try to tell myself to slow down and look carefully, but there's so much going on in your head when you're at the store.  No familiar packaging, everything in Japanese, trying not to block an isle, trying not to get in anyone's way, reading what the food actually is, trying to figure out why one milk is 2 bucks and the one next to it is 5 bucks, the loud music and announcements playing.  Lots of stimulation. Lots of distraction.  The atmosphere gets more familiar every time though, so maybe someday I'll be able to shop...normally. ha ha ha ha! Oh, and the apple mango pieces were AMAZING. I will keep buying them.  Better than any dessert I've ever tasted.

Oh.  Tasha gave me this idea.  I saw her photo of her money and figured I'd do the same thing. $1 = 101¥ or 101円 Yen.

The 1¥ feels like a plastic piece, although I can't bend it for the life of me.

The smallest paper bill they have is 1000¥ ($10), so I pickup a bit of change. Not as much as Tasha though lol.  

Yesterday (today, for you Utah folk) Tasha and I were talking about food and movies.  She talked about how there's tons bread sold everywhere, and how she loves to eat pretzels and nobakes.  I talked about how although there's bread here, but it's not a common grocery I guess you could say?  So I haven't bought any.  Apart from the random treat things I get, my daily food intake is lots of rice, tofu, vegetables, yogurt, coffee and eggs. Pretty darn healthy if you ask me, which is nice.  But man, I  would love to just let go and buy a giant bar of chocolate and appease my junk food cravings. And I can't find oats for sale, so I haven't made nobakes. Sarah mailed me ingredients for nobakes though :-)))))) but I'm trying to hold out as long as I can. I won't be able to eat one nobake a day if you know what I mean ha ha ha.

One of the pre-school parents deals with cattle, and one day they brought to school a giant pack of hamburgers ("han-bah-gah steak" over here) for the teachers.  I don't eat beef but didn't want to offend, so I left school one day with 10-ish patties. One night I decided I may as well try one.  OH MY GOSH YUUUUUMMMMYYYYY.  I've never loved hamburger til now.  I am going to be sad when I run out of those patties.  So good. Maybe I'm just fond of Asian cows ha ha ha!

Tasha and I found out that I hated her favorite musical, and she hated my favorite musical.  And that our favorite musicals both had directions in their titles.  West Side Story & South Pacific.  What a laugh!!!!