Food of the Day

As I find endless entertainment in Japanese food names and packaging, I think I'll make them the subject of regular posts.

Today is Leafy Pie
Written on the package: "This pie was roasted in the form of a foppish leaf. It is the delicious pie of the decent taste."

It tastes kind of like a cross between a pastry and a sugar cookie. In other words, pretty good.

Going brownish-green

One thing that has bothered me since moving here is the amount of waste at the grocery store on base. So much of the produce is on a styrofoam tray and then wrapped in plastic. If you have cheese cut at the deli, they put it on styrofoam and wrap it in plastic, too. At first, I was hoping to instigate for an overall change. That didn't go anywhere. So, now I'm just making sure I make the best individual choices I can when shopping.

I've asked the deli to not use styrofoam when I had some cheese sliced. So, they threw away the styrofoam on something they pre-wrapped and handed it to me. Yeah, that kind of defeats the point.

The latest to make me smack my head at their efforts to thwart my green-going I didn't even notice until I got home. In order to combat the idea that each bag of chips needs its own plastic grocery bag (that we can't even recycle), I've been bringing my own reusable bag. I thought that would solve the problem. Then, yesterday, I was putting my groceries away, and I noticed that they bagged my groceries in the regular plastic bags and then placed those in my reusable bag. Why, people, why?

Exporting culture

First, watch this.



Funny, right? Now, picture me last night. I was substitute teaching for an English conversational class. The very first assignment I was supposed to lead my students in was making up a story based on pictures. What pictures were they? 4 pictures of a bank robbery in process. Key vocabulary words: balaclava, closed-circuit television, bundles, make a getaway, terrify, threaten, etc. So, apparently it is expected that in order to visit the US, you must know enough English to get yourself out of a mugging and to describe a bank robbery. In case you didn't know, guns are illegal in Japan. So, add that to the equation of how they must think of us and our dangerous country.

As soon as I saw what I had to teach, my mind started playing "take anything you want." Then, one guy actually said, in his story, that "two men robbed the bank". So, I started playing "I was robbed by two men" in my head.

Kickoff

I've given in to Justin's "you should blog" comments and finally started one, so welcome into my initial foray into blogging (note: I will NOT use the term blogosphere, except for this one time).

Gourmet Hippie, if you've not been introduced to it before, was originally a phrase friends and I threw around to describe me in college and my future pursuits. It was originally just a cooking show, one proving that it is possible to cook healthy food yet still have it taste good, and that vegetarianism isn't a bad word. That show expanded into a product line of kitchen tools that eschewed the idea that you need a specialty tool for everything. More recently, it's become the name of the B&B I run, somewhere in the world, eventually even if for now it's only in my head.

So long as I'm not actually doing any of those things, why not have it describe my catch-all blog? It will be a little bit of cooking, a little bit travelogue, probably a whole lot of "weird things I've seen/experienced in Japan," and probably quite a few articles that interest me.

To start off, here's one of the weird pictures from my collection taken last week at the Niseko train station on the island of Hokkaido.