More stuff for the apartment.

For a while, we only had a microwave and rice cooker for cooking things at home because apartments in Japan do not come with stove tops or ovens or anything like this. This lead to discoveries like how to make hot cakes in rice cookers and how to hydrate chick peas in these devices (yeah, it actually works), but it was somewhat limited for day-to-day cooking.

In late December, we got an induction burner, which was a good start, but it meant that we could only cook one thing at a time so last week, we finally got around to getting a new burner (we went with gas for the second one) and now we have a proper kitchen set up.

You never fully realize the joys of having two
burners until you try to make spaghetti.

We also finally got some more bowls and plates as well as a few forks (so we don't have to eat spaghetti out of bowls using chopsticks), some glasses (so we don't have to drink beer out of ceramic mugs) and some assorted things for the house.

Many of these recent acquisitions were spurred by our discovery of a 100 yen store in town which is apparently part of a giant chain of 100 yen stores in Japan. The 100 yen store here seems to be better than dollar stores back in Canada because it has much more variety (e.g. they had curtains) and the quality seems to be better.

While we were definitely getting by with what we had before and it's good to know that we don't really need much around the house to make it feel like a home, having a few more things has been quite nice.