We started off by going to get some money from the ATM. Heather's nearest ATM is here at, what I've declared, the "Prudential Center", or "Gaijin Central". The building in this picture is a Prudential building, I think. This is the only place I know of where it is almost assured to spot a white person. You might notice the 2nd floor of that building is a gym. That's where Heather works out. It's called WOW'd, or Work Out World. It's about $100/month and they require you to have a special pair of shoes that you keep at the gym and only use in the gym. You're also not allowed to wear those into the bathrooms. The level of cleanliness here does not quite match up with my own, although, it is quite nice.
Most gyms seem to cost about that much, so I am not getting a membership just yet. I have been doing body-weight exercises, biking, and running only. Anything more is definitely not a necessity.
As with WOW'd, there are many funny marketing strategies in Tokyo. I don't know if it's only when they are in English, but it can feel like living in a land of goofy people. It fits Heather like a glove. The store above is another example I saw on a detour heading to the grocery store. At least the name of the store Perfect Suit Factory is accurately descriptive as opposed to the many stores titled generically with "Sports", but only servicing one sport.
Shopping for food here hasn't been all that bad. Some things are more expensive than in the US, some they just don't have, and some things are cheaper or better. One example of an expnsive item is cheese. This is just plain cheddar and mozzerella, but it costs about $11/lb. It's one of the only items we don't get. Nuts are pretty expensive, too, and they pretty much don't have nut butters. Those are two delicious items we miss very much. Especially since they put in the fresh nut grinding machines at whole foods, one of which had peanuts mixed with chocolate chips. It's painful just thinking about it.We did, however, just start cooking with curry powder after this trip to the store, so we can do without the chocolate peanut butter. We both love curry so much. This was the first time I've ever cooked with it, and it was way too good. It's all I can think about now. I just read about "curry addiction", and I think I have it already.
The other thing we decided to try was cutting up our own fish. The store is full of fish, but it can get pretty expensive. They have many different kinds of fish they sell whole, so we thought we'd try that cheaper option. This was about a 3-5 lb tuna that we bought. I don't know that much about fish, so I can't tell you what kind of tuna. This endeavor definitely didn't go as smoothly as planned, but we did end up with a pile of reasonably priced tuna. I give credit to sushi chefs. I am going to have to practice this a lot before this becomes a regularly viable option. It's ok, as long as I have curry.
2 comments:
chris, i am liking your blog. you have to write about how the keyboards work there, since that has boggled my mind. hope you and heather are having fun!
I haven't seen any keyboards. I should have looked when I was at the store. I found out it's pretty easy to type in Japanese even with our keyboards. When you type the roman characters, it automatically starts writing the phonetic characters. You can choose for it to write one type of phonetic characters or the other or kanji. It's much simpler than I thought. http://www.autopenhosting.org/unicode/type-Japanese.html
The japanese keyboards seem to have one set of phonetic characters on all of the keys. They probably have similar methods of typing kanji or katakana from those, just with half as many keystrokes as us.
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