Five foods I miss from Canada

Today we're flying back to North America for the holidays. Even though I've been here a little less than two months, it's still the longest I've been to Japan and possibly the longest I've been outside of Canada all at once.

While the most difficult issues when it comes to getting around in Japan are language-related like how I can't talk to store clerks, understand bar conversations or read all the signs, this isn't what I miss most about being in Canada. It's possible that without daid to talk to, I might miss this a lot too, but luckily we get to hear lots of English from each other.

Instead, what I miss most are various foods. I like the food that I've been eating here and many of the foods I miss are things that I would have maybe once a month while living in Canada (sometimes less). However, I think that the absence of all these foods at once just makes me miss them all so much more. Thus, without further ado, I present my list of five foods I love which are not available in Japan (or are at least not widely available and affordable here):

Pizza

I'll start by pointing out that pizza exists in Japan. I've even had pizza since I've been here (last time was when we made some pizza in Tsukuba), but pizza is kind of expensive here. For instance, at Pizza-La (the largest pizza chain in Japan and the only one I know of in town), a medium plain cheese pizza (プレーンチーズピザ) is 1050 yen (just shy of $11 CDN). In comparison, a medium plain cheese pizza in Canada can be had for as little as $5 and it will be considerably larger.

Cheese

Like pizza, cheese is something that exists in Japan and it can be pretty tasty. However, the cheese that's available here is mostly processed and there's not much of a variety. The stuff that isn't processed is pretty expensive (even by Canadian standards) and I think the only kind of non-processed cheese I've seen is Camembert. Maybe there are specialty shops where a nice blue or some cheddar is available, but I haven't seen it.

There was some time in undergrad where I couldn't afford to buy cheese and I was pretty unhappy about that. This is similar, but worse because I'm not finding free pizza every week either.

As a result of my cheese deprivation, I recently had a dream where all I did was eat various cheeses. It can't be good when one is dreaming about nothing other than eating dairy products.

Burritos

Before I moved out of London, a Burrito Boyz opened up downtown near my apartment. As a result of this development, I rapidly developed an addiction to delicious, tasty burritos. When I moved out, getting someone else to make me burritos became more challenging, but at least I had easy access to all the proper ingredients to make my own.

In principle, the ingredients for burritos exist in Japan, but some (like the wrap) are specialty items and others (the refried beans, possibly the salsa too) have to be home made. Also, sour cream in Japan is not the same as sour cream in North America. It tastes about the same, but it's a lot thicker and really expensive (a 100 mL container can be had for about 400 yen). Finally, there's the "no real cheese" issue again.

Falafel

Long predating my addiction to burrito is my addiction to falafel. These wonderful balls of chickpeas and/or fava beans and spices with tahini and garlic sauces, pickled radishes and assorted deliciousness all wrapped in a warm pita do not seem to exist at all in Japan. We've found places that sell chicken shawarma, but they do not sell falafel sandwiches, which makes me very sad.

Salt and Vinegar Chips

Edamame chips. Possibly
delicious, but no substitute.

There are chips here and there are a variety of flavours some of which I've never seen in North America, such as pizza or edamame flavoured chips. I wouldn't want to eat all of the chips that are around either: I'll pass on the shrimp and octopus flavoured chips.

My favourite kind of chips is missing though. It's not clear why salt and vinegar chips don't seem to exist here, since salt and vinegar are two flavours that seem to be appreciated in Japanese cuisine, but apparently not in chip form.

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Soon, I will have access to these foods and I'm so excited about this prospect (which is probably kinda sad). Unfortunately, I won't be able to bring all of these with me when I come back (maybe I can bring some chips, but those aren't going to last long). However, since these foods are not necessarily good for me, I'm probably better off without them on a regular basis anyway.


On another note, I found the followers gadget (as the things off on the side are called) so if you would like to follow my blog, please do so. :)

Land of (in)convenience?

If you haven't been to Japan, you might associate it with being very modern and in many ways it is. However, Japan is a largely cash-based society, which can seem rather old fashioned, especially if one is coming from Canada, the country with the highest rate of debit use per transaction in the world where plastic money is accepted just about everywhere, even the dollar store. In Japan, if one want to buy groceries, clothes, a meal at a restaurant or even pay a hotel bill, one typically has to pay in cash.

There are also issues with ATMs here, such as after hours convenience charges---where "after hours" means "after 3:00"---and there are ATMs which close at times as early as 4:00 on weekdays and do not open at all on weekends. In addition, most ATMs do not accept international bank cards, so if you want to take out cash and do not have a Japanese bank account, you have to find a 7-11 (which is easy since Japan is home to 30% of all 7-11s in the world) and use their ATM or find a post office ATM (which are sometimes at train stations, but are not open all the time). Note that if you use an ATM at a 7-11, you should be aware that you are required to take out at least 10,000 ¥ ($102.89 CDN as of 2013/12/16), which is very unlucky if you happen to have a daily withdrawl limit on your bank card set at $100 CDN and forgot to change this before coming to Japan (oops).

So, on Saturday when I wanted to take out some money, it was a bit of an ordeal. First, we went to the post office near our apartment and found that it was closed. Then we went to the big post office in town which was open, but for some reason, the bank machines in the post office would not accept my PIN. I would input my PIN and the enter/confirm key would light up, but wouldn't do anything when I pressed it. At this step, the "cancel" button had disappeared so I had to wait for the machine to time out and return my card.

We thought that the first machine we tried might have been broken, so we tried another one only to get the same result. At this point, we had to run because daid had a meeting so we tried the 7-11 machine on our way (and found that it had a transaction limit that was too high for me to take out money). Eventually, I managed to get some money out by stopping at the post office ATM in the train station later, but it was still much more hassle than necessary.

The ATM by the cafeteria at daid's work.

I've had some issues getting cash in Canada before (if memory serves, finding an ATM downtown Calgary on a Sunday was lots of fun), but that was typically because I tried to use my own bank to avoid fees and even then, I could still buy things with my credit or debit cards. I've also never seen a closed ATM in Canada. I've seen buildings which contain ATMs that are locked, but in Japan there are times when the building is open and the ATM inside it is closed. For example, to the left is picture I took of the ATM outside the cafeteria at daid's work during dinner service. Across from this machine, you can put money on your meal card, but if you didn't get money earlier in the day, you're out of luck.

Although I have heard Japan referred to as the "land of convenience" due to the proliferation of convenience stores, which are indeed very convenient (in a previous post I briefly mentioned that it's possible to buy entire meals at convenience stores), in some ways things here are quite inconvenient. To a point, I can understand why some stores might not want to add credit card functions (it costs the store for each transaction) and I can understand why banks charge after hours convenience fees (everyone else does it, so why not make a bit extra off your customers). I do not understand why ATMs close when the buildings they're in are still open though. One can get inside the train station most hours of the day, but the ATM in the train station closes at 9 pm on weekdays and even earlier on weekends (hours before the last train comes in). So if you spent your last yen on beer out in Tokyo, you can't buy a snack when you get off the last train.

Another thing that seems like it should be easy to do and more convenient for customers is to leave packages at the closest post office to one's home after a failed delivery attempt. Last month, daid got a care package from his parents and we went to the post office near our apartment to pick it up. The package wasn't there and we had to walk to the main post office in town to pick it up. It's not that far of a walk from where we live, but it is the only post office where you can pick up packages in the entire city. This probably explains the giant line that seems to exist every time we've been to the post office (there's also only one window at which one can pick up packages).

Personally, I'm not sure what the purpose of having a local post office is if not to hold onto packages for you. I guess you can mail packages from there (in principle, we haven't tried), but if they can hold onto outgoing packages, it shouldn't be too difficult to hold onto incoming ones for the neighbourhood as well. If they don't hold onto outgoing packages either then there's not much point to having a post office; it would be easier to sell stamps at the grocery store or something and have a drop box for letters outside.

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Pouch can be used as underwear and PET bottle?

On an unrelated note, daid and I went out to buy some crafting supplies for a project that we're making at home. I'll post pictures of the finished result some time in the new year since we're unlikely to finish it before we take off to North America for holidays next week. However, while we were at the store, I discovered that yarn here is significantly cheaper than what I find in Canada. The selection wasn't so great, but since we shopped at a department store this isn't surprising.

We also spotted this pouch (pictured to the right). While it seems cute and somewhat practical, I feel like it cannot be used as underwear, contrary to the claim on the packaging.

Christmas in Japan!

If you know a little about Japan, you might know that the most common religions in this country are Shinto and Buddhism. If you know a bit more, you might know that more than 70% of people in Japan are not religious at all, really. At any rate, the percentage of the population who are Christian is something like 1 to 2%.

Some signs even look fairly permanent.

So why, you might wonder, am I posting about Christmas here? The answer is quite simple: Christmas is relatively popular in Japan. Complete with signs, lights, fake trees and Christmas carols in the stores replacing the usual store theme songs (yes, some stores here have theme songs) all wishing passers by a Merry Christmas in one way or another.

Obviously, the religious aspects are not popular and people do not get the day off work, but the part where people are encouraged to buy things for each other is very popular. Especially with the stores who want to sell more things.

Because everyone loves capitalism!

Even Kentucky Fried Chicken has gotten into the Christmas spirit, or rather, it has been in the Christmas spirit since I arrived at the beginning of November. While KFC is pretty omnipresent in Japan generally (Japan is its the third largest market after the US and China), the company has also convinced Japan that fried chicken is a Christmas food, so they start promoting special Christmas meals early (because they have to be ordered in advance) and dress the Colonel in a Santa suit and hat.

Colonel Santa brings you tidings of fried chicken!

It seems that Christmas has also become a romantic day, which is a more recent, but still interesting trend. It's a bit odd that Christmas has become a romantic holiday since Valentine's day (where women give men chocolates) and White Day (where the men give gifts to the women who gave them chocolate) exist here as well. It almost seems like Japan is making a point of being rough on single people. 

Second Thanksgiving and the really long fall

On Saturday, we went to a Thanksgiving party hosted by one of daid's friends. It was a potluck, which is normally fine since neither of us mind preparing food. Unfortunately, we still don't have a burner at our apartment (and we're never going to get an actual oven) so our cooking abilities are somewhat limited.

Luckily, we do have a rice cooker and there are surprisingly large number of things you can cook in a rice cooker, like this recipe I found a recipe for a vegetable hot cake. So we tried to make that, though we swapped out all the veggies for different ones, added some spices, sprinkled some cheese on it and doubled the batter. That last decision was probably not the best idea since we ended up cooking it twice in the rice cooker and then putting it in the microwave (which has a bake function that we still haven't really figured out) before it finished cooking on the inside.

In the end, we got something that reasonably resembled a hot cake and was pretty tasty. It also disappeared almost immediately at the party which is always a good sign. We made it again yesterday for breakfast using a single serving of the batter and it turned out much better. Clearly, this calls for more experimenting with the rice cooker. Perhaps the next step is to make some actual cake!

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One thing that has been really nice about living near Tokyo is the weather (though I will probably not say the same thing in the summer). Unlike back home, where the weather will shift from summer to winter in a week or two (and vice versa in the spring), it's still fall here. The leaves are still changing and the air is nice and crisp. It's getting a bit cold at night (though still above freezing), but during the day it's warm enough that one can almost do without a jacket.

Granted, I'm not sure that Tokyo has what I'd consider a proper winter at all since the temperature doesn't seem to drop much below 0°C and it doesn't snow very much. It's still nice to have a long fall since this is a relatively new experience for me.

Soba making, JAXA visit and more!

The conference I attended last week was fun, interesting and a little tiring (basically, how conferences are generally).  Since we had to eat out all week, we had some issues ordering food that wasn't full of meat (or with secret hidden meats), but we managed to do it. We also had a chance to impart some advice about vegetarian foods found at combinis (convenience stores) to another vegetarian we met at the conference who recently moved to Japan.*

On Friday, we went on the conference excursion which consisted of going to a cooking school where we learned to make soba noodles which was a lot of work, but not too difficult (just a little tricky at times). While we made noodles, others in our group made pizza dough then we had to go roll out our dough (which the instructors insisted on getting us to use rolling pins for), add sauce, toppings (corn was included among them because this is Japan) and cheese. I tried to add cheese before the toppings and was told this was incorrect. I acknowledged my "error" and was going to wait until the instructor went away to do it that way anyway, but he stood there until I'd put my toppings on and had nothing to add after the cheese. daid simply dumped all of his cheese onto his pizza before anyone could "correct" him.

Either way, the pizza was good, then we got to have some cold soba. For cold soba, the noodles are cooked, then chilled and served with a dipping sauce that contains dashi, soy sauce and mirin called tsuyu. You can add wasabi and scallions to this sauce if you like it that way and when you're out of noodles, you can also add some of the water the noodles were cooked in (sobayu) to make a hot drink.

After lunch, we went to JAXA's Tsukuba Space Center where we got to look at rockets and walk around inside a life-sized model of Japan's contribution to the International Space Station (ISS) which is a laboratory called Kibo which means hope. As well, there were some models of Kounotori which is being used to resupply the ISS and we got to hear all about it, as well as the rockets being used to carry it up. 

After the planned activities were done for the day, daid and I wandered up to the University of Tsukuba where we admired the leaves that were turning colours as well as the campus. The campus is pretty hilly and there is sort of a floating sidewalk that runs through much of the campus connecting some of the hills (so you don't have to walk up and down a lot) and cars can drive underneath (so you also don't have to mix your cars with your pedestrians).

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On Saturday, we met up with one of daid's friends and drove out to the Ushiku Daibutsu (where dai = big and butsu = Buddha) which is the tallest statue in the world (according to Guinness). We went inside the daibutsu and looked around, then went to part of the petting zoo and pet some rabbits and guinea pigs, then we went off to a football (soccer) game.

We went to see the Kashima Antlers play, but we arrived at the stadium a bit late. This meant that as we were walking up to the stadium, we got a taste of how loud the fans were. We could hear them from at least 500 m down the street and when we got into the stadium, we found that most of the noise was coming from just the fans behind one of the goals.

It was something I've never seen before. I've been to see professional sports and I've seen some coordinated cheering, but this was a whole new level. First of all, it was coordinated cheering that went on for the entire game. Secondly, there were people who brought drums with them (which probably helped keep it so coordinated really) and there were other fans who brought really large flags to distract the other team when they took penalty kicks and the like. People at that end of the field seemed to spend the entire game on their feet jumping up and down and singing.

Unfortunately, they lost, but it was still a good match.

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*For reference, the mainstays of vegetarian food available in combinis consists of ume (pickled plum) onigiri (rice balls, sometimes wrapped in nori), kombu (seaweed cooked in some sauce) onigiri, wakame (a different seaweed) onigiri, shiso (a leaf related to basil used to flavour ume during the pickling process) and red bean onigiri and egg salad sandwiches. Sometimes there is also kimpira and inari sushi or some pastas (which the clerks will heat up for you) and the usual things like chips (minus the shrimp or whatever seafood flavoured ones).

In Tsukuba

Yesterday was or today is my birthday (depending which side of the date line you're on... it's no longer my birthday here). It's probably only the second I've celebrated with daid, and it's definitely the first I've celebrated at a conference and away from most of the people I know (which made it a little hard in some respects). However, we went out at the end of the day yesterday and had a lot of fun, so it was pretty good overall.

We started the day poorly, by getting totally lost on the way to the conference though. We barely missed the train (the doors were shutting as we got to the top of the stairs) and since the next train was 20 minutes away and we estimated the conference centre to be a 30 minute walk (compared to 20 minutes waiting for the train + 3 minutes on the train + 10 minutes walking from the train station to the conference) we figured it would be reasonable to walk there. Unfortunately, the roads in between were small and winding and we walked for 45 minutes before finding the conference centre.

We took the train (well, really three trains) to Tsukuba Sunday evening and it seems to be quite nice so far. Tsukuba is a planned city which was designed with the goal of accelerating scientific research, so there's a lot of research that happens here (daid has been here for several experiments, though less since the big earthquake destroyed one of the accelerators) and even the manhole covers are appropriately themed with depictions of space shuttles and Saturn, which is pretty awesome. Interestingly, the city's name is typically written in hiragana (as つくば) instead of kanji (Chinese characters), which means that I can actually read its name instead of memorizing the symbols (which is more common since kanji is the traditional way to represent city names).

It's also surrounded by mountains, which is awesome because mountains on the horizon make for a gorgeous city.

Settling In

I've been in Japan for almost a week and I got to feel my first earthquake for this trip already yesterday morning (last time I also got an earthquake). It was a magnitude 5.5 and a 3 on the JMA seismic intensity scale locally (in Wako-shi). It was startling to wake up to the room rattling and I might have punched daid in the face, but apparently he forgot this.

On the weekend, daid threw me a Welcome to Japan! party. In preparation for the party, we visited the local liquor store and found that they carry Chimay as well as a few good beers from Nagano (apparently this is where the good Japanese beer comes from). I'll still miss Canadian beers it seems, but at least there's an option that is more familiar than the local beers and also delicious.

We played Cards Against Humanity at the party which provided me with an opportunity to learn some interesting words in Japanese, but unfortunately I did not retain them.  Probably it's for the best, since I'd rather avoid stumbling around for a correct word in Japanese and come up with the one for boner when that's not what I want to discuss.

We're still settling into the new apartment. daid moved just before I got here and we're in the process of acquiring things like furniture and appliances. We finally figured out how to connect the washing machine to the tap today. It had some weird plastic thing sticking out and we couldn't snap the hose onto the tap properly. We'd been working under the assumption that we were missing a connecting piece until we went to Bic Camera and the guy just handed us the most expensive washing machine connector and tried demonstrating how to deal with it without being helpful at all. I think that he caught that we didn't understand and he might have actually thought we'd buy whatever he handed us, but we put it back and just went home to fiddle with it more and we got a proper explanation today so now it works.

The apartment is coming together and even though it's missing things like furniture or an internet connection, it's starting to feel a bit like home. I'm sure that once I have some drawers to put my clothes in instead of living out of my suitcase and get better at finding my way around here, that will only get better.

Waiting for departure

As I sit at gate E73 in Pearson (YYZ) waiting for my flight to Narita (NRT), I can't help but notice how much has changed since I started flying semi-regularly. It's not surprising that things have changed in the airport, it had been somewhat ill-suited for people waiting around on their laptops for quite a while. Last time I went to Japan a year and a half ago, I had to balance my laptop on my knees while I enjoyed the free wifi that was finally available. The first time I went two years before that, there was no free wifi and I napped on the floor because I'd arrived for my flight 4 hours early (the joys of taking a shuttle from 2.5 hours away).

It's not just the airport that's changed, of course. Last time I flew to Japan I was squeezing in some time with daid (my other half) before going back home to London to do some work and then running off to a conference for which I was perpetually in the wrong time zone. This time, I'm leaving for almost two months and returning for vacation. Instead of cramming in as much time together before being separated for a large portion of the year, we get to move in together (it only took us a bit more than 2 years of being married to get around to that).

The big change that allows this to happen is, of course, the fact that I've graduated. I no longer have anywhere in particular to be so I can be with daid instead of us being apart. As a result of these changes (the graduation and the moving) I've decided to start this blog. I'll try to write at least weekly (aiming for Mondays), but perhaps I'll find enough interesting things to say that I'll write more often.