You may have heard about a “traditional” Christmas in Japan, and I’m talking about food here – KFC and Christmas cake. There is lots of information out there on Christmas in Japan, let me throw you a link to Tofugu whose post is nice and quick and easy to digest. I had a talk with my middle school kids about Christmas, and I think the general consensus was they didn’t really celebrate it. About half had Christmas cake, I think they were all too young for the romantic experience of it all. My English teacher is a bit different perhaps from most Japanese in that she is very interested in Western traditions, she celebrates with her children, they each get one present and they put up a Christmas tree.

I think it is also important to note that at least in my area, kids think that Santa comes from Finland, rather than the North Pole. So I think they have combined more closely Santa and Saint Nicholas, even though wikipedia says St N was from what is now called Turkey, something I didn’t know… There is one man who I haven’t had the pleasure of introducing on this blog yet. His name is Chatty Man, and I have had many pleasant experiences with him. One was him explaining in a condescending way about St N, how he is actually Santa. I believe I had to control my reflex to eyeroll and explain that yes, I know who the big N is…. Sorry, I had to get that frustration out. Lucky for me Chatty Man is at the school I have just left. It is also interesting that kids in Japan don’t know what elves are. Some of my classes know who Dobby is from Harry Potter, and I was like “yes! He’s an Elf!” Although he is only an interpretation of an elf and the Christmas elves are a bit different, but at least that is a concept of an elf they can grab onto. My 3rd graders at Middle school knew who Dobby was, and then my 2nd graders in Primary school knew too, but then my 5th Graders in primary school didn’t know who Dobby was. (Interesting fact about Carlie: I dislike Harry Potter with a passion). The kids also got confused when I ended classes with “Merry Christmas!” “It’s not Christmas yet…” Yes, we do say it during the Christmas period, and I wasn’t going to see them again until after Christmas… Christmas this year felt very un-Christmas like. If I didn’t ask for holidays I would have had to go to work. Instead I went to Nara and had KFC for lunch, the most “Christmasy” thing I did. I have to say I like KFC in Japan. The chicken tastes just as fatty but you don’t have the oil running down your arms as bad. Also the bread on the burgers doesn’t taste as floury and cheap as it does back home. Some nice pluses.

My Christmas feast. Not a good substitute for Christmas food back home, but as far as KFC goes it was pretty good. I didn’t have any Christmas cake, I think this was enough calories for one day… Merry Christmas!   Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.  

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Spew Shoku! Soon To Be Invading Mie-ken Pungent Hamburgers at the Kansai Airport Merry Christmas ‘09 Let’s Shopping!

給食.　Kyushoku. School lunch. Some people love it. Not me. When it’s bad, it’s very very bad, and when it’s good it’s pretty bland. Lunch time is a time I fear at school… If you are curious about what school children eat in Japan, here is a collection of photos of school lunches…

I go to five schools, but from Monday onwards only four. At the school I’m leaving on Monday, it’s a sizable school of about 500 children. At this school I go to individual classrooms and eat lunch with only a class. It is my understanding that this is the usual in Japan, that students eat in their own classrooms. I pay $2.40 for lunch at my primary schools and $2.80 for lunch at my middle school. Usually the money is collected monthly which i put in a nice little envelope. So it is cheap and good value for money – after all one of my complaints about it is that it is too much food! The rest of my schools have 38 – 110 kids. It’s a bit unique in Japan, but at these schools we all eat in one room. I sort of end up at the same table all the time which is nice I guess.

The Proceedure Some students put on aprons and masks to serve food. The actual serving changes per school and class – some the children line up with plates and go through conveyor belt style, others the servers serve up everything to the table and then the students arrive to their spot with the food already there.

The Food I don’t get the food at all. I mean, I guess I just assumed that these would be balanced, healthy meals. They aren’t. The base of the meal is either a bread roll or a large bowl of rice. And there is always milk. From there… it could be anything. I thought perhaps it would be meat, veges and fruit, but it could be anything… My main concern, however, is the amount of seafood. My predecessor told me that seafood is rare. I knew I shouldn’t have taken her word, as seafood is maybe every second day. I don’t like seafood at all, and because of this I look to lunch with dread…

This here is actually a good day. The shreaded cabbage is a taste I’m a bit over, and I don’t get how this carb overload is balanced, but pasta is a win for me. At the start I had trouble eating so much rice.  

Another thing for me to complain about! I have never really been a fan of soups. I find them really bland. Lucky for me, soup is often a common feature in school lunches However, the plus side is you can dip your bread into them. The bread is so dry that I find it really hard to eat by itself (I’m the kind of person who likes butter on my bread) but it is a bit more bearable after being dipped in the soup. On the plus side, even though there is a lot of rice with meals, I do find it to be really nice rice.  

Lunch is either eaten with either a fork or chopsticks. It is always interesting to see if people eat things by picking them up whole or trying to break them apart with the utensil provided. There is never a spoon so soup is to be had by picking up the bowl. I can’t help feeling a bit rude every time I do this. Note the shredded cabbage again. Yay!  

The stuff to the top left is mochi – pounded rice, which I find waaaaaay too sweet. The middle stuff, I’m not sure what it is besides seaweed, but with this stuff I’ve gotten to the point where if I have more than a mouth full I want to throw it back up. It’s gross!! The stuff to the right are local grown vegetables. They are potato and carrot and daikon, and are actually really nice but they put on/cook them in some kind of sauce which I am not a big fan of. So it makes it a bit of a challenge to eat. There is something missing from this dish too:  

Now, deep fried fish I’ll try. Grilled fish too, you know. It’s gross, but I might be able to bear it. With this, I’m not touching it with a ten foot pole… It’s some kind of fish with babies inside. And you eat the head and tail. Um… no thanks. I think only non seafood eaters can truely understand the horror of this.  

An article about how schools use local grown ingredients in school lunches.  

Another popular serving is the salad doused in mayonnaise. Which can either be a welcome change to a bland salad or sweetness overkill. This lunch is another one of those good lunches! Yay! The Rest… Before lunch everyone always says “Itadakimasu!” and after everyone says together “Gochisosamadeshita”. After you have finished eating you separate all the rubbish. Milk cartons are always washed and then flattered out. And then finally I can breath a sigh of relief… It’s over and I wont have to face that enormous, seafoody event for another 24 hours. Yay! Yeah, I know. Not liking seafood… I moved to the wrong country.   Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.   If you like this post, please soc it at JapanSoc, a social bookmarking website for everything Japan related!  

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Soon To Be Invading Mie-ken Pungent Hamburgers at the Kansai Airport Let’s Shopping! I do not like green eggs and ham Goodbyes are always so hard…

While at the Kansai International Airport I thougt about having food. So I went over to the food stand. What to have, hmmm, so many choices. Should I have the ham and chadder cheese panini? Hmmm… something about that just doens’t sound right…

A plain hot dog sounds alright but a pungent cheese hot dog sort of turned me off the thought of a hot dog…    

prawn and hot Sand of grill vegetable… well, the trouble is I like prawns even less than I like eating sand… The menu turned me off so much that I instead decided to wait til I was back in Osaka to get some food. What I guess confuses me the most is how this happened at an international airport – one would perhaps think more thought would go into a translation in a place like that…

This post is my submission to the October 2009 Japan Blog Matsuri, hosted by Sleepy Tako. This month’s theme: hamburgers.   Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.  

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I do not like green eggs and ham Train Ticket Masterpieces in Kansai Airport Making the Most of Japan Let’s Shopping! A Night In Osaka

Let’s go shopping at the local grocery store! At my local you use baskets – either carry them or put them on the trolley. Luckily the grocery store is pretty close so I don’t have to buy large quantities of items at a time.

Mmmm chu hai Having alochol in the supermarkets is novel for me, even though there are states in Australia, as well as many other places in the western world that does this. Fairly large selection if you are into beer or sake.  

Cheese! I have heard that cheese can be hard to find in Japan. Well, not in my Japan. I have a wide selction of cheese from parmesan, camembert, to sliced plasticy goodness. All for what I percieve is a pretty reasonable price.  

Meat is cheap, but tastes cheap too. I am planning to check out the local butchers for some better quality cuts.  

There is a good selection of milk as well with both low fat and no fat avaliable.  

Taco flavoured Doritos! There is a large selection of chips and lollies, some things familiar, lots of new things.  

Bread only comes in this half loaf style with like 5-8 slices. If you get five slices, they are quite thick, or eight thinner slices. No crust bread in sight, or anything other than white. If you want to get adventerous with your bread, you are better off trying the many flavours of bread rolls you can get.  

Assortment of cereals. The boxes are ten times smaller than those from home. And for some reason the kids at my school still don’t know what cereal is even though it is in the shops…  

Beef here are all thinly sliced for ease of eating with chop sticks. Heavly marbled with fat too which is good for the taste bads but bad for the waist line/heart  

Section for hot foods. Sitting in hot oily goodness. Who said that Japan was a healthy place?  

Rice. Even though I live next door to rice, even though it is eaten at every meal, it is damn expensive here.  

Some smellies. Some familiar brands. Make sure you read the katakana carefully though…  

Here is some fruits and veges. The prices are expensive, but over all I don’t think they are as bad as I have heard prices can be. Also there are lots of stalls around here with fresh local fruit with decent prices. Fruits here are mostly large and very juicy.
 

At the end you pack your own bags. You can buy plastic bags for 5 yen each or you bring along your own bags. As I have previously been employed as a check out chick I am a pro at the awesome bag packing. I hope you enjoyed the tour of my local food place

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A Night In Osaka Tour of the Neighbourhood Soon To Be Invading Mie-ken Living In The Land Of Japan I do not like green eggs and ham

I love Osaka at night. We were staying at Dotonbori and it is just awesome at night. Lots of people, bright lights, loud noises. Great food, and not so great food… Warning, lots of photos in this post! Here’s a video of us coming back to our hotel room after riding the Hep 5 Ferris Wheel, and some of Osaka at night.

After a little rest from all the excitement of the day, the sun set and it was time to go out for some food and excitement. The above photo was our view from our hotel, the Hearton Hotel as the sun went down.

There are these long covered streets that go on forever filled with shops! It is a shopper’s dream. Too bad I was with non-shoppers and didn’t have as much money as I would have liked thanks to a bad exchange rate!

Uniqlo was recommended to us as a good cheap shop to go to to buy clothes. It actually reminded me of Cotton On, for those of us who live in a place where Cotton On is. Sort of generic plain clothing, but a huge store. Prices were so so as well. I mean, cheap in the way that Cotton On is cheap, not Supre cheap. Sorry I don’t have better examples but I can only explain things from my own world view!

At the circular bridge area after the shopping street and before the big food/lights area.  

Well, I guess you could say this is the beginning of the big lights area.  

The famous running man, the first photo in this post, was also here. This is where the first section of my video above was filmed.  

One thing that I really noticed about Osaka was all the bikes! They were everywhere. Makes me because I am a bike person too. No, not motorbikes, push bikes.  

I don’t have a photo of one, but the bikes here have stands that come down from both sides of the wheel, which is way better than them coming down from one side of the wheel like they do here. Bikes are always falling over here in Australia.  

This was a line to one of the Takoyaki stands. Maybe the mistake I made when I ate takoyaki was that I didn’t line up here.  

Big crab (note: lucky I proof read this) that moves. Aparently powered by bicycles. Wouldn’t surprise me.  

In case you are unsure, we are now in the part with loud noises and lots of lights.  

The way to advertise in Japan is to have bright flashing lights and loud music. Louder music, so you don’t get drowned out by the advertisement next to you.  

Ramen. Mmmmm. I miss cheap, awesome, delicious ramen.  

One great thing about obviously being a tourist/foreigner is that many people handing out flyers ignored us.  

I most definitely recommend Osaka for a shopping enthusiast.  

Hot food vending machine. Is actually a microwave that cooks frozen food. I wish we had more vending machines here in Australia, they are the best idea ever. I need an everything vending machine down the end of my street.

For dinner we had some yakisoba. Mmmmm.  

Yes, I’m left handed.  

And thus was our night adventures in Osaka! I was too exhausted to do much more - I had waaaaay too much excitement. If you want to see more awesome photos (huh) check out my Osaka gallery.   Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.  

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