September 14. 2004 20:55

Of Food, Phones and Post Offices

The Japanese are pretty silly. They put "do not eat" freshness preservers even in candy and bakings. How is a freshness preserver gonna help in a bun that will be in-sellable in a couple of days anyway? And how do hard candies lose their freshness? I don't understand.

But all that ready-made or pre-made food at the convenience stores is really handy. I can eat a set of sushi whenever, I'll just go buy one at a convenience store. They're not even that expensive, like ready-made in Finland tends to be. Today I cooked a nice bag of meat sauce that only needed to be dropped in hot water for 3 minutes (still in the bag, that is). And it was pretty good. These kind of things help a lot, since I'm not that great a chef and I can't read anything when I go to the market ^_^ The instructions on pre-made food tend to be really easy, so I can figure out how to make it by just looking at the tiny pictures :P Besides the unlucky incident with the freshness preserver in the soba, I've already had very much trouble finding sugar, and today I bought "fruits au lait" thinking it was plain tropical juice. Ugh, I want my ananas-orange juice without any milk in it... *makes a face of disgust*

The thing I miss here is candy. Yes, there is candy here, but only the hard kind, or then the traditional ones that I haven't dared to taste yet (mainly because they really look like they should be eaten at some special feast, not alone). I miss soft and chewy candy, and I really miss fudge. The main reason why I miss snacks in the first place is that I'm reading that Harry Potter book. For one, I always end up hungry when I read, because I'm somewhat aware of my body when I lay "doing nothing", if you understand. Secondly, they keep eating such tasty sounding food and candy in the book that I can't help always dreaming about eating it too... Damn that Honeydukes, why does it have to sound so tempting? English children's book have too much food in them, I remeber hearing this about The Five as well... Today I couldn't help buying a bag of Werther's Originals, even though they, too, are the hard kind. Reading books is bad for my health...

Anyway, lately I haven't been doing anything interesting. I got my student card today, now I'm just waiting for my alien registration card to get everything else rolling. I think I could get a phone with just my student card, but the alien registration card is needed for a bank account and for the Internet connection. And actually, I kinda need the bank account to get the phone, because they take the money for the bills straight from the bank. But the phone thing has had some progress, as I found another phone maker who does mobiles for international use. Besides the two models from Vodafone I found three more by KDDI au. They seem pretty nice, so now I just have to hunt down a KDDI shop and ask for the prices. I think there's one at the shopping streets downtown, so the next time I go there I'll drop by.

The mailing system is pretty interesting as well. I sent a package of info on hotels to my parents today, so I got the first touch of the Japanese post services. It seems there are two classes you can send in: "letter mail" and "print mail". Mailing only print-outs is cheaper, but if you put a hand-written note or other kind of a letter in, it suddenly becomes more expensive. I couldn't convince the girl at the post office that my envelope only had hotel prochures in it, though, so I had to pay the letter price. (There was a long note in it, which I certainly count as a letter, but I had to try anyway :P)