Conbini Dining

So first of all, I apologize for my lengthy blog absence. We had a midterm and then the week after was the week after the midterm, so I went out a lot and then it was my birthday and then the new Harry Potter book came out and well . . . you get the idea. So I hope that people are still checking for new stuff and have stuck with me through two weeks of a bad poem about red bean paste. (P.S. Anyone who wants to talk HP, email me! I was so concerned about getting the book here and then it turns out, it was available July 21st at the local book store, before it even went on sale in the US. Awesome!)

Also, in a bit of non-Japan related news, Udi got his visa!! Yay!!!! So he is officially coming to the US and we are officially moving in together. This is all very exciting - we knew that there was no reason for him not to get one, but you never really know, so to have it for sure is very comforting. But this has totally turned my mind to the fall, and I am all excited to get home because it means that he will come!!

Okay, back to the topic at hand, that is, Japan. A vital element of living in Japan is the conbini. In English, this translates into convenience store, and there are American chains like 7-11 and AM/PM (there are also Japanese companies like Sunkus and Lawson's) but it's really quite different from an American convenience store. I can't quite describe it, but the conbini is just better - cleaner, better food (though the quality does vary) - some of them are like what Target would be if they were a convenience store (in Japan), if that makes sense. Some of them have seating areas and resemble small supermarkets. You can do tons of stuff at the conbini - buy movie tickets, arrange to have stuff mailed, pay your bills, pay your insurance etc. The conbini also sells magazines and manga, and all sorts of different food, everything from chips, yogurt, and ice cream to drinks (including canned coffee, another widespread thing here) to sushi, hard-boiled eggs, bento (packaged lunches) and my personal favorite, onigiri. Onigiri is a very popular snack in Japan - it's essentially a rice ball with a pickled filling, wrapped in nori (seaweed) and they are absolutely delicious. I always get the umeboshi (a pickled fruit), because it's veggie (and it brings back memories of when YaYa famously spit out the umeboshi on America's Next Top Model!) Along with being very yummy, onigiri are also brilliantly packaged. (This brings up another thing I love about Japan, the packaging is amazing, you never need scissors to open anything!) Part of the joy of an onigiri is the crispness of the nori compared to the soft rice, but if you put the nori right next to the rice, it would get soggy sitting in the refrigerated case. So onigiri are packaged in a way where there is a layer of plastic between the rice and the nori, but you don't have to take the nori off to remove the plastic. If you look at the picture, you see the corners labeled 1, 2, 3. First you pull down on 1, which pulls off a strip of plastic to splits the packaging in half. Then you pull on 2 and 3 which pulls the two pieces off, while also pulling out the thin layer of plastic that is between the rice and the sushi. Amazing. And then you get to eat the yummy onigiri, so happiness all around.