Japan Trip Travel Log Day #10Jeremy's Home Japan Trip Travel Log Day #10
This has become a bit of a recurring theme. We woke up and it was raining. Hard.
So we packed up the van and chatted for a bit, ultimately deciding that visiting the sights in the pouring rain would be no fun. So we headed back home and really didn't get lost much. We missed a turn or two, but nothing serious screwed us up.
At a rest stop along the way home, Aaron and I got out to do our business. After we were done, he suggested that we stop in the little convenience store and look around because there's usually some amusing stuff there and we might be able to pick up some "Mystery Food".
Intrigued by the prospect of getting Mystery Food, I agreed and we headed in. After a few minutes of looking around, I came to the conclusion that folks in Japan eat some really strange stuff. We couldn't tell what a lot of it was, but just the packaging really made you wonder. And the stuff that we could somewhat identify all seemed to be raw this and skinned that.
Eventually we selected a few items to purchase. One was a doughnut like bread thing that we knew would be pretty safe. Another was a treat which is basically long skinny pretzels with chocolate inside. The third item was a box of Mystery Food. We had little idea what was in it. If the graphics on the were to be believed, there might be some fish products in it. Or not.
Once we got back to the van and hit the road, we broke out the identifiable stuff and chowed down. Once it was mostly gone, Aaron daringly opened up the Mystery Food and took a sniff. I wish I could have seen the look on his face when he smelled that nasty fish-like smell. The only thing I can think of to describe it is that dry, flaky fish food that pet stores sell. It smelled like that but with a bit more fish in it.
Yuck. That was 300 Yen down the tubes.
Aaron was the only one daring enough to try even a small fragment of the stuff. He did not enjoy it.
After arriving back at the house, we realized that we were hungry and that nobody really wanted to go anywhere or spend much money. So we ordered pizza again. That's an American instinct if there ever was one.
After dinner, Aaron, Scott, and I set out on my newest quest: to find and purchase a portable CD player for the plane flight back. A few days ago I convinced myself that it'd be a worthwhile investment because:
And thus began the quest. We headed out (in the rain) to the local train stop, got our tickets, and hopped on. Moments later we were headed for the electronics super store known as Media Valley. Aaron and I were there about a week ago, but this was Scott's first visit. So we made a point of visiting all 6 floors and checking out the merchandise before I got really serious about finding the CD player I wanted.
The problem was that portable CD players were nowhere to be found. They had internal CD-ROM drives. They had external CD-ROM drives. They had DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, Zip, Jazz, and all sorts of other removable media drives. But no portable CD players! They even sold cell phones.
Grr.
So just for kicks we wandered across the street to a place called Tokyo Hands and checked out the merchandise there. They carried a little of everything (except CD players). We did discover that their entire top floor was almost exclusively guitars and guitar related stuff (picks, strings, stands, etc.). Scott really enjoyed the guitar stuff.
We headed back to the house empty-handed (at least the rain had stopped) and had some Scotch before going to bed.