Things Discovered In Japan, a brief list
Mar. 31st, 2019 10:43 amI cooked and ate *two whole meals* today. And hard-boiled some eggs for breakfast/snacking purposes. Between the basic 'foreign supermarkets' problem, the gluten issues, and the tiny kitchen I'm working with (two hot plates, no bench space), all of my spare brainpower is going on food right now.
1. The coffee from vending machines is cold, but the tea is usually hot.
2. Coco-ichi, a chain curry house, have some 'allergen-free' curry options. I did not personally discover this: I declined a lunch invite from someone at the orientation on Saturday, on account of betaking myself and my packed rice salad lunch to the park where there are no glutens. He helpfully came back to report that the place he'd ended up going with a group of other teachers had marked allergen-free options.
3. My mental image of Tokyo is pretty much entirely drawn from the neighbourhood of Shibuya (which was apparently the reference for the setting in Bladerunner. For some reason I'd thought it was Beijing). The quiet outer suburb I'm living in is nothing like that, and that is Okay By Me.
3b. My Shibuya-based mental image of Tokyo did not include 'The Aldgate', a British style pub in the second floor of one of the narrow buildings. They win points by virtue of having more gluten-free options than most UK pubs in the actual UK do.
4. Honey lives between the japanese teas and the western-style teas. I discovered this after three laps of the supermarket. On initially finding it, I thought perhaps it was because honey is a sweetener for tea, but then I realised the Nutella also lives in that section. I'm FAIRLY sure no one puts nutella in tea (although... there is hot chocolate powder in that aisle too. You could make some pretty great nutella hot chocolate if you wanted).
5. There's a national park type thing about fifteen minutes walk from here, with gentle walking trails and a 'sakura hill'. A++, good work, Machida-shi.
6. It's much easier to serve up vietnamese style rice noodles if you use chopsticks as your serving utensil. (This discovery really courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bedlamsbard, who mentioned 'cooking chopsticks' on one platform or another. Otherwise I would never have thought of turning to my new hello kitty chopsticks in absence of a spaghetti lifter or salad fork.)
I've set up some photos from this week (plus another cache of Darkest Lancashire photos that I found on my camera, left from last year) in my Tumblr queue. They probably won't feed through tospeculumannorum, though, because that relies on a bunch of IFTTT scripts, and google are blocking IFTTT from accessing google email accounts from 31 March. I will, I guess, eventually set up IFTTT to route through something else, but the whole system i have going involves two different IFTTT accounts and three gmail accounts, so. It will take a while to repair. In the meantime, ![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
speculumannorum_feed will keep working, I assume.
1. The coffee from vending machines is cold, but the tea is usually hot.
2. Coco-ichi, a chain curry house, have some 'allergen-free' curry options. I did not personally discover this: I declined a lunch invite from someone at the orientation on Saturday, on account of betaking myself and my packed rice salad lunch to the park where there are no glutens. He helpfully came back to report that the place he'd ended up going with a group of other teachers had marked allergen-free options.
3. My mental image of Tokyo is pretty much entirely drawn from the neighbourhood of Shibuya (which was apparently the reference for the setting in Bladerunner. For some reason I'd thought it was Beijing). The quiet outer suburb I'm living in is nothing like that, and that is Okay By Me.
3b. My Shibuya-based mental image of Tokyo did not include 'The Aldgate', a British style pub in the second floor of one of the narrow buildings. They win points by virtue of having more gluten-free options than most UK pubs in the actual UK do.
4. Honey lives between the japanese teas and the western-style teas. I discovered this after three laps of the supermarket. On initially finding it, I thought perhaps it was because honey is a sweetener for tea, but then I realised the Nutella also lives in that section. I'm FAIRLY sure no one puts nutella in tea (although... there is hot chocolate powder in that aisle too. You could make some pretty great nutella hot chocolate if you wanted).
5. There's a national park type thing about fifteen minutes walk from here, with gentle walking trails and a 'sakura hill'. A++, good work, Machida-shi.
6. It's much easier to serve up vietnamese style rice noodles if you use chopsticks as your serving utensil. (This discovery really courtesy of
bedlamsbard, who mentioned 'cooking chopsticks' on one platform or another. Otherwise I would never have thought of turning to my new hello kitty chopsticks in absence of a spaghetti lifter or salad fork.)I've set up some photos from this week (plus another cache of Darkest Lancashire photos that I found on my camera, left from last year) in my Tumblr queue. They probably won't feed through to
speculumannorum, though, because that relies on a bunch of IFTTT scripts, and google are blocking IFTTT from accessing google email accounts from 31 March. I will, I guess, eventually set up IFTTT to route through something else, but the whole system i have going involves two different IFTTT accounts and three gmail accounts, so. It will take a while to repair. In the meantime, speculumannorum_feed will keep working, I assume.