I was craving a bubbly soda and I’ve hit the jackpot! I’ve seen soda in the (estimated) 16oz/500ml plastic bottles just like the U.S. but they run about 150 yen. A while ago I went from convenience store to convenience store to see what the different stores offered and I found a 500ml can of Coca Cola at the Daily Yamazaki for just 100 Yen!
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.
If you’re ever in Japan and you’re craving something cold, sweet, and cheap I highly recommend the Tiramisu which you can find at Family Mart. This inexpensive Tiramisu is made with one layer of chocolate cake, one layer of vanilla pudding, and coffee + cocoa sprinkled on top.
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.
When we first moved to Fukuoka we stopped by Costco with some friends. One of the items I bought was 9 pounds (4.08 kg) of Quaker Oats which I eat for breakfast a lot. I ran out this week but luckily we went to Costco a few weeks ago and I grabbed another box. Sure you can buy these online at a few places in Japan but it costs an additional 500-700 Yen for the box. Buying direct from Costco costs around 1200 Yen for this box. Anyway, it’s huge. The box is huge, the amount of Oatmeal is insane, and I say this because I’m more adjusted to smaller things and less quantity. I thought I’d share some pictures so you can see what it’s like.
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!
Yeah… I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it or not but I’m 15 minutes away from 6 Starbucks Coffee shops here in Fukuoka. Now that’s going north, south, and east. I haven’t checked west yet…. there’s probably 3 more that way somewhere. One of the Starbucks is across the street from another Starbucks and about 3 blocks or so from another one down the side street.
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
- It’s kind of crazy in my opinion
- They are is busy and the city is big
- I love it!
Continue reading ‘Starbucks in Japan’
I forgot to include this picture so here you go! What’s interesting is right when we entered the Yahoo! Dome there was a cell phone company giving us king size snacks that taste like Cheetos. And there’s a snack bar, just like any other baseball stadium, but instead of beer, brats, and burgers they sell beer, yaki soba, takoyaki, and ramen. The prices were about the same. I just can’t imagine watching a game in the stands while slurping on some ramen using chopsticks while drinking beer. In that scenario there’s just too much going on. Of course I say this now, but just wait… in a year I’ll be doing it.
I had some nabe (pronounced: naw-bay) the other night and it was the bomb! I’m going to throw in some terminology with pronunciation on this Japan it UP! entry. This tasty dish is a soup or stew that’s served in a clay pot because it stays warm after the flame is turned off. You can make nabe for two but we usually eat it with friends and everybody grabs frood from the same pot.
 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.
You might remember my post about the tiny Japanese Coca Cola, well I guess I’d call this one a huge size here in Japan. Mai (my fiancee) and I were eating at a crepes shop a few days back and we noticed this display with a different looking large size container. It’s about the size of a 32oz in the U.S. (or 950ml?) but here it’s shaped as a half cup + half milk carton monster with a hole for a long straw. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and Mai said this is the first time she’s seen this in Japan so it’s not the ‘norm’
With all the tiny cute coffees around I wonder if my eyes are deceiving me and it is actually a 24oz cup. I guess I’ll never know unless I buy one, bring it home, and measure it which probably won’t be happening.
In America we usually do a mutual exchange of gifts, etc. I give her something, she gives me something, I take her on a date, ah… love is in the air. But Valentine’s Day In Japan is something that’s quite different for me. This is my first time celebrating Valentine’s here and there are two parts to this holiday. On Valentines Day a girl will give the guy some chocolate. It’s either purchased or hand made. The 2nd part is White Day where a guy gives the girl a gift, that’s approximately 3 times the value as he received (so I’ve heard from wikipedia). I wasn’t able to get pictures of the store displays, but they look exactly the same as the displays in America except there are tons of chicks and almost no guys wandering in that area.
Because it was too much chocolate to handle, my fiancee gave me a gift on the 13th, and then one on the 14th. On the 13th she hand made a chocolate parfait! It was amazing! It looked and tasted like it was expensive and hand crafted by a chef. It contained chocolate, ice cream, more chocolate, cake, chocolate covered crispy things, and strawberry Pocky. Oh, and hand whipped whip cream! Here are a few pictures (sorry for the blurriness, I’m not used to my friends camera yet). It was delicious.
On Valentine’s Day she gave me a wonderfully wrapped gift. It looked expensive and the presentation was great, so at first I thought she bought it at some expensive shop. She told me that she hand made the chocolate using ‘an idea’ but no recipe and a few ingredients she thought would work. And she wrapped it herself.
Here’s my blurry picture of the chocolates when I opened the cute basket they were in.
And finally here are the chocolates she made. They were powered with cocoa and had a very rich taste. It wasn’t a dark chocolate taste, and wasn’t a milk chocolate taste, it felt like a truffle when I ate it, but it was nothing I’ve tasted before.
When I opened the gift I felt overwhelmed and a little teary eyed when I ate the first piece because I know she spent all of that time and effort to prepare everything and that’s very special to me. Even when it’s not a holiday she often does special things like this to show me how she feels about me, and she is the first person in my life to ever do this. She’s so great. This was the best Valentine’s Day ever.
Every now and then I hear this guy singing a cool little tune at night. No music, just him singing a melody. I asked my fiancee what it is and she told me it’s a truck that sells ishiyaki imo (sweet potatoes). How awesome is that? I would never think “Hey, I could really go for a sweet potato” … until NOW! For a while I’ve been on a mission: run like an Olympic sprinter, catch this guy, enjoy the full ‘Japanese sweet potato out of a truck’ experience. The result? I’ve eaten one of these once, and I’ve seen the truck twice, and I have a picture!
What does Ishiyaki Imo mean? I asked this very same question and here’s the answer broken down. Ishi = stone, Yaki = grilled, Imo = sweet potato.
My Imagination: Now here’s what I was thinking about this truck before I saw it. I figured it was a pickup truck, some guy that cooks them on the back of his truck, and he sings his song out of a megaphone, he’s a happy guy that just loves giving out sweet potatoes late at night and apparently the job is fun and exciting. He drives fast because he wants to cover the entire city.
The Reality: Not quite what I was thinking. From my experience, an older guy drives either a truck or a van. He’s not singing, he’s playing a recording over a megaphone and this explaines why the song is perfect every time he drives by my place. He does drive slow, which means I’m just not running fast enough (time to hit the gym?). He has cooking gear on his truck but when I went all of the potatoes were ready to go. I spent 400 Yen ($3.75 at the time) for a big hot potato. And big as in huge, it looked like they gave me the biggest one in the sweet potato field. Good thing I was hungry!
The potato was hot and it I enjoyed it. Just eating a hot sweet potato is quite different from The Outback Steakhouse version back in the U.S. which is smothered in butter and cinnamon and maybe some sugar.
Here are a picture from the truck.
Here’s an Ishiyaki-Imo old school setup which I’ve never seen in person (photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Here’s a YouTube video I found. The song doesn’t have as nice of a melody as the truck Fukuoka, the truck is slow and not busy, but it’s cool to check out.
Good stuff.
Pizza in Japan is usually quite a bit different from the American version. Here they put some crazy things on pizza like shrimp, squid, tuna, mayonnaise, sesame seeds, teriyaki chicken, corn, potatoes, and sometimes mustard. Oh yeah and sausage. Not the sausage you might be thinking, but more like the Super Bowl Sunday little smokies. Also the prices can get insane. A pizza for two people can easily cost around $25 USD. At least you don’t have to tip the delivery person which is a plus. Here’s a menu from Pizza LA. So far I’ve found pizza most like the ones you can get in the U.S. at Costco and Dominos. Costco doesn’t deliver and they are located about 1 million miles from me.
Here’s a Pizza LA Commercial
Continue reading ‘Japanese Commercial: Pizza LA’
