Fresh sliced fish perfect for grilling

Egg stuffed fish... I stay away from this. I don't like the exploding eggs when you chew it.

Tiny fish, great for a yakitori style dinner. Slap it on a stick, grill it, eat it just like that.

Now let’s work on getting some Chicago style pizza cookin’ in the bakery Mr. Grocery Store! If they had a suggestion box I’d be dropping notes every day. Non-seafood-non-mayo pizza, big steak, some Diet Dr. Pepper please and thank you.

Besides the last picture, the quality isn’t bad for a 2 megapixel camera phone.

I haven’t eaten any melons yet, but I think I’d save myself $20, I mean 2000 Yen, and take the melon on the left!

This was a surprise gift from my wife this evening. The story she doesn’t know is I spent a over half of my day on the phone today with people in the U.S. and one of them was snacking on some jelly bean during our conversation. I go “My god man, are you eating M&Ms?” and he’s like “Nah, they’re Jelly Beans a al Costco” It made me a little jealous… but not anymore! I didn’t tell anybody about the conversation so it kicked ass when I opened my eyes to these.

My DR Pepper is in the fridge, M&Ms are in the freezer, “Goldbaren” are on standby, and half of the salt & vinegar chips are “in mah belly”, ah yes, good times.

There were breaks between some of the firework explosions to announce sponsors of the event on a loudspeaker. I’ve never seen this before. I wonder how much an ad placement costs. One sponsor was Coca Cola and a big bottle of coke lit up near the end, but I didn’t get a picture of it.

Kids were using a flat paper net to catch goldfish, and turtles! It was ¥100 per try and they were doing great even though the net break easily. Food like grilled meat on a stick, takoyaki, dangly tentacles, and other mystery meat ran ¥400-500. Here are a few pictures.

Summer festival fireworks

"I like Turtles!"

Mmm... grilled tentacles

Takoyaki aka Octopus

I’d say it’s smaller than this huge Coke I saw at a crepes store. And it’s only 47 yen more than the 160ml can of Coke I found at Sunny (a grocery store chain).

First of all before your journey you’ll need 100 Yen. That’s right, tax is already included in the price!

 Next, you’ll need to find a Daily Yamazaki convenience store. It looks like this (I got the picture from Wikipedia)

And here are some pictures of the beast of a drink!

For the ultimate cheap snack I recommend this 100 Yen Coke and the 105 Yen Tiramisu. Both combined are cheaper than the Ishiyaki Imo from the back of the traveling guy’s truck.

The price… 105 Yen.
The satisfaction… 80%

It seems to have more pudding and fluffier cake than the 300 Yen Tiramisu’s at 7-11, but it’s nice because it’s light, sweet, and delicious.  I took some pictures so you can see it in action!

This what 105 Yen looks like. This is all you need to get this party started. Reminds me of a quarter and a big penny with a hole in it.

And this is what a Family Mart looks like (picture taken from Wikipedia)

And this is the Tiramisu. The conbini clerks also give you tools to conquer your quests. Today’s weapon of choice is a tiny tiny spoon.

As I open the container I see it has Japanese writing on each side. I can’t read it so I assume it says “Tastes great! Only 105 Yen hellz yeah! Fat free and calorie free, just like the State Fair food you eat once a year back home! You should try to put it on a stick and deep fry it some day. Enjoy! / 140ml”

And here it is in the final stage of life. It took 2 minutes to devour with the tiny spoon. I like the spoon… it forces me to slow down and enjoy things.

Here are the directions. As you can see there are instructions for food service preparation and the two bags come to a combined total of 102 servings.

Here’s the box with the 2 bags of Oatmeal that was inside.

Here’s are some details.

This is after I filled up my small container that lasts about 2 months. Now I’m good to go!

So here we are… going into the Starbucks that’s inside Tsutaya.

For the record… Tsutaya is pretty sweet. It’s 6 stories and you can rent DVDs, CDs, buy them, get books and magazines, and enjoy some Starbucks. The DVD releases that have been out for a while usually run on a special that’s 4 DVDs for 1000 Yen. I’d say about $9-10 US.

Here’s kind of a cool photo

And here’s a picture I took from Starbucks of Starbucks across the street while enjoying some coffee with some friends.

By having so many Starbucks so close to me I’d have to say

1. It’s kind of crazy in my opinion
2. They are is busy and the city is big
3. I love it!

Nobody has spoken English to me at Starbucks so far. So how do I order? First thing I did was listen. I listened to other people ordering coffee and just repeated what they say. A lot of the items sound similar to the way I say it in English. I also asked my fiancee about a few items. And if it’s busy I usually order as good as I can and point to the pictures at the same time. So far so good!

I’ve enjoyed my visit to all Starbucks in Japan so far. Sure, they don’t use a $20,000 coffee maker, but they do good work. They’re all very clean, casual, and the employees are very very friendly. One location (which I took a picture of) has screwed up orders taken from a native Japanese speaking customer 3 out of 4 times so far but the other locations are perfect. I do go to smaller cafes but I do like chain shops and restaurants because you get what you expect, meaning I can order a latte from the U.S. or in Japan from a chain and it’ll taste the same. To me that’s a good thing when I don’t have time to hope my money and satisfaction will work out in my favor. I’m a big fan of not wasting money. I do like the inexpensive instant coffee here in Japan, but treating yourself to a 410 yen latte is always nice.

Interested in more info? Here’s the Starbucks Japan website in English. If you’re interested in knowing some prices, just check their beverage lineup or look at some samples below.

Caffè Latte Cost:
Short 240cc = 280yen || Tall 360cc = 330yen
Grande 480cc = 380yen || Venti® 590cc = 430yen

Coffee of the Day:
Short 240cc = 310yen || Tall 360cc = 360yen
Grande 480cc = 410yen || Venti® 590cc =460yen

First of all, what is shochu? It’s a distilled drink and I’ve seen 20%, 25%, and 40% strength with most of them being 20-25%. There are over 20 varieties and the most popular main ingredients are potato, rice, or barley. How does it taste? I’d say it tastes similar to sake but less fruity, it has a bite, and the 40% tastes like whiskey. If I were to create shochu from existing drinks I’d take sake, remove the fruity flavor and smoothness, then I’d take Gin and remove the pine tree flavor, and mix them. If you want to know more, here’s a wikipedia link. Shochu ranges in price and you can get a good brand for 900 Yen or up. If you missed missed my liquor price check post, check out my alcohol prices in Japan.

All, or almost all, of the Kyushu Island shochu distilleries were present at this fair. It was 300 Yen in advance, 500 at the door, and you got sample as many different types of shochu and plum wine as you wanted. Each taste is about one shot or half of a shot so you definitely had to pace yourself and luckily it appeared that everybody was doing just that. Also they made you get a bracelet showing that you’re not driving home before you started your shochu adventure. The guys handing out the 40% shochu were giving me about 1-2 shots worth every time! I ask for a little, then that’s 1 shot, it was crazy.

POTATOES HOOOOOOOO! That’s right, rollin VIP in the JP yo. We visited one of the booths from Kagoshima to enjoy a tasty sample of their sweet potato shochu. The people at the booth and Mai got to talking about Kagoshima and their shochu. The company is one Mai’s friends favorites back in the U.S. so we bought two small bottles for 500 yen as a gift which were connected nicely in twine. As an added bonus they gave us a big bag of sweet potatoes to go along with it! How awesome is that? Word on the street is that Kagoshima is famous for sweet potatoes. I have yet to eat a sweet potato while drinking shochu made from potatoes, but it’s on my list of things to do. The second part of our VIP status happened when we were at a booth who insisted on giving me a double shot of the strong whiskey type of shochu which was 45%. And then they gave us two small bottles for free. That was surprising and very cool of them. He kept saying “It’s good, it’s good!” and I kept thinking “It tastes like ass! It tastes like ass!” but I got to enjoy some last week and he’s right, it’s good. *Note: Sweet potato shochu is not sweet.

Here are more pictures from the shochu fair. First I want to start with my favorite ones. The first one is Mai puring some shochu from a barrel

Fans of MXC will appreciate this one! Hideo Higashikokubaru is now governor of Miyazaki Prefecture.

Here’s a tasty snack. It tastes ok.

Huge Mario and other games for the kids.

And now here are the rest of the pictures I took. After the Yahoo! Dome we headed over to Hawks’ Town and I’ll post about that in the next few days.

 This time our nabe was filled with a soup, udon noodles, carrots, cabbage, crab legs aka ‘kani’ (pronounced: Connie), and some sausages. I think the sausages give it a western style taste and this time we used cabbage instead of “hakusai” (pronounced: hawk-sai, or hawkseye) which is Chinese cabbage. We cooked it on a burner right on the living room table. The table is called a kotatsu (pronounced koh-ta-tsu). A kotatsu is  a table used mostly in Japan and is a wooden table covered by a heavy blanket with a built in heater underneath to keep you warm. Great for warm winters! Bad for people with dust allergies. I’ve never had it before coming to Japan but here they have nabe restaurants which are very affordable. If you get the chance you should enjoy some nabe with a group of friends. Maybe there are some restaurants in your country that offer nabe, but it might take some investigating to find them.