It didn’t afford the same opportunities to make fun of the local cuisine as does a trip to, say, Japan.  Fish and Chips are, well, fish and chips anywhere, and there’s only so far you can go with making fun of Spotted Dick or Toad in the Hole or Bangers and Mash.  People have made fun of the names of British food for ages and there’s nothing really I can add to it.

What I CAN add, however, is this item which I ate in Oban, Scotland:

It’s a pizza.  Not a terribly big one, mind you, about what we’d call a “small” in the US.

It’s got cheese and pepperoni on it.

Oh, and it’s been dipped in batter and deep fried and it comes with a plate of fries – pardon me, “chips” – on the side.

This is not – NOT, I repeat, some kind of “fair food”.  This is on the regular menu, as something one might legitimately order as a meal on a regular basis if one were suicidal.

And yes, I ate it.

But just the once.

Because, well:

I know I’m a bad man for saying something like this, but that sounds like a medical condition.  As in “Surgeon General’s Warning: Prolonged Exposure to Power Ring Energy may result in…”

Japan, fortunately, agrees with me, though they just call the stuff “Soft Cream” and leave it at that.

This last trip to Japan, I ran into a development in Soft Cream technology that, well, is probably nothing new but which I found to be bloody brilliant.

Basically, instead of having banks of different ice cream machines, each one dispensing a different flavor, they’ve put the actual ice cream into these little styrofoam cartridge things that each hold a single serving, so you can have very small stalls that nonetheless offer a nice variety.

For example, this sign taken from one of the two soft cream vendors at the Great Buddha at Kamakura:

or this truck from Ueno Park, which was selling seven varieties of soft cream in addition to quite a rainbow spectrum of shaved ice:

Anyway, faced with the panoply of new flavors, I saw it as my duty to expand into the Worlds Beyond Vanilla.

For example, sweet-potato-flavored soft cream, which was fantastic:

and also purple, or purpple if you’d prefer.  Apparently, in Japan, purple is the color of sweet potato, and this summer seemed to have a LOT of sweet potato flavored products for sale.

Also, sesame, which was a little less fantastic on the first bite but which grew on me by the end of the cone:

and they’ve even cracked the swirl problem.  In a display of mad-scientist-level-genius, they PRE SWIRL their soft cream before packing it into the aforementioned styrofoam cartridges:

Ahh, Japan.  For all your problems, you do have your good points.

The Japanese reads “Businessman’s breakfast yogurt” and “Includes konnyaku balls”, by the way.

It was an interesting yogurt experience.  It was, unsurprisingly, banana flavored, but a little bit bitter and the addition of konnyaku gave it a surprising texture.  This is yogurt you can actually sort of chew, which is just not a verb I traditionally associate with yogurt.

All in all, fairly good stuff and quite lived up to the punchy nature of the packaging.

Tamago dog! Basically egg salad in a hot dog bun, yours for a reasonable Y100 at your nearest Family Mart.

Out of the package:

And actually it was pretty yummy. 

I’ve noticed that expiration dates on food here are super short; I’m used to buying yogurt in the US and having a month or more to eat it, whereas here food has expiration dates of, at best, a week and a half past the day you’re buying it.  I’m going to chalk that up to Japan being a much smaller place, making food shipping from place to place quicker, so they’ve never needed to get into the hard core preservatives like in the US.

It is a different mindset, though, and I’ve had to get past my initial reactions of “this food is too close to its expiration date! I can’t buy it now!”

Having been to Japan a few times and seen the patently ridiculous parfaits you can get in cafes, I can empathize.  They’re huge and look really delicious and ordering one as a man is possibly the least manly thing one could possibly do, right down there with buying a poodle.

That is, unless you’re some kind of pro-wrestler type and built like you’re made out of bricks and are buying a poodle as an ironic statement.  Cause I can kind of get behind that.

Anyway.

With me in Japan at the moment are eight other students from my university, and we were discussing my desire to taste the forbidden dessert and it transpired that one of the others wanted to buy a parfait as well and she didn’t mind being my “cover” for ordering one for myself.

It was also my birthday, so I felt that I deserved to explore previously unknown vistas.

Anyway, we went to the nearby “Jonathan’s”, which is a family restaurant – think a Denny’s, for reference – and ordered us up a couple of parfaits.  I may or may not have been wearing a false beard and sunglasses.

This was mine:

For the record, the list of ingredients as enumerated by the menu:

• Strawberry sauce
• Soft-serve ice cream
• Cookie
• Nectarine
• Corn Flakes (yes, there were, don’t ask me why)
• Yogurt
• Vanilla ice cream (a layer of non-soft-serve)
• Aloe (presumably the little green leaves on top)

Now, this wasn’t the most overdone parfait I’ve seen – this was a Jonathan’s, after all, not some fancy Shinjuku cafe – but it was plenty silly and I felt that I had adequately sated my hunger for girly treats, while still managing to hang on to the last shreds of my waning manhood.

For example, the other day I’d found a place that had enticing plastic window food, most of it adhering to the ”tonkatsu + sauce = love” equation, and it was my intention to go back there for dinner.

My walking companion, however, wasn’t so sure about the place, and then wasn’t terribly keen on the idea of going into an Okonomiyaki place, and so we wound up at, well…

I’m going to defend the trip to McDonald’s as another instance of me sacrificing my sanity and stomach for the benefit of the few poor souls who stumble across this blog.

Anyway, the current seasonal burger in Japan is the Teri Tama burger, available also with cheese as the cleverly named “Cheese Teri Tama” burger, and I ordered one of those.  I also went for the strawberry-yogurt McFlurry, probably because I figured I wasn’t doing myself enough harm with the burger.

It has yogurt in it, it’s got to be healthy, right?

Anyway, the burger, etc:

Between a bun – that was, as an aside, woefully inadequate to withstand the assault of the various sauces – you get some mayo, lettuce, an egg, some cheese (presuming, of course, that you have selected the CHEESE Teri Tama), and a burger liberally soaked in teriyaki sauce.

The overall effect is interesting, if a little disturbing.  It’s kind of in this indeterminate state between solid and liquid, and gives the impression that, if you wanted to, you could probably swallow the burger without necessarily chewing.

Needless to say, it was terribly messy to eat. 

The McFlurry was, as expected, strawberryish and a little tart from the yogurt, nothing special to mention there though it was fairly good.

The true surprise of the evening?  I wasn’t actually in intense intestinal pain after eating this thing.  I’m going to file that under “incredibly lucky” and refrain from pushing my luck by going back for another one.

That is all.

Problem is, I’d never updated my address with Newegg.  I didn’t realize this until the day it was delivered, however, when I looked at the UPS tracking page and saw “Delivered: Portland, OR”

And I cursed a bit.

Fortunately, when I called my old apartment building, they were willing to put the package aside for me and not hand it over to the current residents of the apartment, who presumably don’t need any hard drive enclosures.

Then I just had to drive two hours to go and pick it up, which meant that I was going to be in the Portland area anyway, which meant that I could do stuff like shopping at Uwajimaya and H-Mart and Fry’s Electronics and having lunch at Marinepolis in Beaverton.

So I guess it wasn’t a total loss of a day.

Anyway, last term in Japanese class – and I promise this is all leading somewhere – I was in a small group project team with a woman from the Ukraine.  As a side note, this is the single unluckiest student in the world, because her last name happens to be one of the most vulgar words in Japanese slang and I am constantly torn between finding a way to subtly warn her and being afraid to mention it lest she already know.

At this point, you have all gotten entirely the wrong idea about what the title of this blog post refers to.

Anyway, when we were working on our project together, she’d mentioned that she really missed, of all things, candy from her home country, and I remembered while I was having sushi that there was a European market and deli in the same shopping complex as the sushi place, so I decided that I would go there and get their business card to pass on to her so she could potentially get her fix of the taste of home.

I didn’t, you know, pick her up any snacks, because that might have been inappropriate and I’m a cheap bastard and to be honest I don’t know how to tell Russian candy from Ukranian candy and I think I might get beaten up if I made a mistake there.

On the other hand, I wasn’t going to leave empty-handed, so I browsed the snacks & candy selection until I found a few things that looked promising, and bought them:

Basically, I wound up with two packages of cookies from Poland and two candy bars.  The largest is also Polish, the smaller is from Tomislavgrad, a city in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Wikipedia tells me is one of two political entities that comprise the nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Wikipedia then tells me is one of six former Federal units of the former Yugoslavia.

Let me get one thing straight:  That second candy bar there is the single most educational piece of candy I have ever purchased.

Anyway, I’m saving the chocolate for another day because I suspect it’s going to be pretty similar to chocolate from pretty much any country in the world.  That is to say, any country outside of the US, because the rest of the world considers our chocolate to be one step above brown candle wax and I’m hard pressed to fault them on this topic considering news stories like this one.

On the other hand, the cookies looked tempting.

In adherence to the universal laws of snack food, they looked a little better on the package than they did once I’d gotten them out:

The vanilla, I’m sad to report, was nothing extraordinary.  It didn’t seem worth the trouble that had been taken to ship it all the way from Poland to Portland.  I suspect that any Polish expatriate needing a fix of vanilla-flavored “Delicje Impresie” would be well served by any number of vanilla cookies available in the United States.  Let me be clear – it was good, it just wasn’t exotic.  I expected more from the 9th largest country in Europe.

Again, thank you Wikipedia for turning this into an educational experience.

The cherry, however, was really good.  It was almost exactly the flavor of black forest cake, or Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, the traditional dessert from southern Germany.

And thank you again Wikipedia.

Now, I don’t know your personal views on Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, but speaking only for myself I’m a big fan.  So having it in cookie form is a Big Win, and I now have a generally favorable view of Poland and each and every one of its 38,130,302 (estimated) inhabitants.

Misoyaki Don:

This was on the daily specials board at a local Japanese place, with no description. I figured, I like miso, I like yaki, let’s give it a try.
It turned out to be grilled chicken & onions in a really yummy miso-based sauce, over rice. NOM NOM NOM. Now I just have to hope it stays a special.

The “Transporter” movies:

A friend recommended these ages ago, but we’d never watched them until we saw a trailer while out shopping. If we hadn’t, we would have seriously missed out. Goofy fights, laws-of-physics-defying car stunts, and a guy who makes sure to always keep a spare tie and dress shirt in the trunk.
Amazing.

0.3mm mechanical pencils, 0.4mm ball-point pens:

Kanji are so much easier with a really fine point. I’m breaking a lot of leads, but I’m getting the hang of it.