Shopping

We have now almost got shopping sussed, and it really has taken us this long.

The Japanese do not do 'supermarket shopping' as we do, rather they go to the shops every day, and buy the food they need for that day. Now that's all very well if you a) don't go out to work b) like eating bits of squid and tentacles off other sea-creatures; we fit neither of these categories.

Every week, now, I go to the OK Discount Supermarket (Felix thinks it's hilarious that they should call themselves, 'OK' - sounds a bit crap really!) Anyway, OK is OK and it's relatively cheap - this is where the Japanese go, so, as you'd expect, everything's written in Japanese! We now regularly buy pak-choi and beansprouts, daikin (a sort of giant white radish) noodles, rice, miso, rice sprinkles (recent, fab discovery!) and chicken. You can also get small pieces of cheese, milk and yogurt in OK, so it serves us fine. Funny thing is, most people there fill a small basket, Neve and I normally go on a Sunday morning while Felix and Ross are at rugby and over-fill two very large baskets, which we then have to transport back on our bikes - this always makes for an interestng journey back, especially because, on the last three visits, we have bought 'bargain' umbrellas (neither Neve nor I can resist a bargain, and today's brolley was extra-good becuase it was reduced from 1,000 to 190 yen (about £1.40) and it has loads of spikes - even Felix got excited about it - Ross questioned why we now have 7 brolleys, but hey, it's rainy season, and it WAS a bargain!)

So our basics are sorted. We then need flour for the bread-maker, now at first, we were buying this from the International Supermarket (at about £6 per normal sized bag of flour - makes for rather costly sarnies!). Then a mother at school told me that someone had told her that someone had told her about a concension shop on the 8th floor of a large supermarket in Shinjuku, not far from where I work. How excited was I when I found a HUGE bag of flour for not much more than you'd pay at home, so I bought 6kg of the stuff (which I then had to carry home) however, we can now have bread without worrying about it!

Fruit and veg is difficult to get here - you can buy the basic pay-choi and beansprouts, and spinich. You can get brocolli imported from China, but it's very expensive, and apparetnly has so many pesticides that you could use it as mozzy repellent! We eat a lot of bananas as you can get these at the SunKus (circle K) convenience store down the road. I buy apples occasionally, as they're £1 a piece. Have yet to buy cherries, can't face spending 20p per cherry. The best one we saw, however, was peaches - was about to pick up a box when Felix pointed out that they weren't £7 for a box of 8 peaches, but £70 for a box of 8 peaches - decided against peaches!

We've still to find decent washing powder, and they don't do anti-perspirant here (someone visited the factory from the UK and kindly bought us two boxes of extra-strength Ariel, and some decent 'runt!) Anyone who visits, please expect a large order from us!

Our saving grace is CostCo (large American hyper market) which is about 1 hour's drive away. We've been there twice now, and each trip is a great excitement - we buy all sorts of rubbish and totally slob out eating cakes, crisps and salsa each time we go! Nearly running out of all this nice stuff - so another trip is looming (might have to figure out how to drive the car for this one!)