laundry

October 27, Hiroshima cont.

Funny how even doing your laundry can become an adventure in a foreign country.

The instructional pictograms on the washing machines in Japan were a little cryptic, but our clothes came out ok. Matt found some house-wife manga (kind-of their version of Good Housekeeping). There was a lot of sex but most of it was everyday husband wife sex.

I find cartoon sex to be very odd.

My culture shock still hadn't quite worn off, so we had lunch at Subway. I find the subtle differences with chain restaurants interesting. They had guacamole and shrimp toppings, and sweet potato fries with basil powder. It felt strange when we ordered, as the staff person spoke perfect english with a North American accent. We had been rehersing our order in Japanese but were so stunned that we couldn't manage to order properly in Japanese or English!

There's a lot of rain in Japan, so there are a lot of umbrellas. Shops have rows of tiny compact ones with handles shaped like penguins, monkeys and Barbapapas (do you remember them?), and cute jinglish phrases printed on them. I chose a little pink one with a cartoon pig head handle.

By supper time, I was finally feeling brave enough to venture as far as gyoza with asian food. We found a little shop, Gyoza-honpo Tachimachi, near the neighbourhood where we were staying. Suzuki-san fed us a variety of tasty fish and braised veggies and taught Matt a bit about good sake. In fact, Matt had quite a bit of good sake and went off later, giddy, to find a bottle of the local product to take home. We found out later that the place is even organic.