d&h : in Japan for 3 years

Nan taco

Yup, MOS Burger has created something that we’ve never imagined before!  It’s the nan taco.  Basically, taco filling and tortilla strips on top of a nan.  It was quite good, but not good enough for me to eat it > once a month?

K class cars

Japan has small cars.  There’s a different class called “K” class which looks like a Scion XB, but is cheaper and has less taxes.  The fuel efficiency and utility value make the car very popular.  Most people like them as their second car for the house.  We’ve rented them before, but this Mazda..  wow, it was a weak ride.

The license plate is specifically yellow to indicate that it’s a K class.

The car is small, but quite roomy, although this rental car was definitely bare bones.

Max speed of this car?  120 km/hr.  Thats only 74.6 mph!   The car was literally struggling at anything over 100.  Well, at least the engine was crazy loud.

The inside of the car was pretty darn cheap.  The radio was a standard size DIN radio, but the car didn’t have any speakers.  So half the radio was a tiny speaker.  Lastly, we did rent this from the Mazda dealer.  I was shocked at the prices.  1 car battery > $500 USD.

Can of oil > $80

Gas’ing up the car was a funny experience.  We went a full service place, and it was the usual ‘mantan kudasai’　満タン, full tank please.  However, the full service also means that the guy will go into the street, and slow down traffic, so you can pull out of the gas station.

Self serve was even more fun.  The panel to select fuel is insane!  The left side of the pump says, please touch here first!  Yup, that’s to get off the static electricity from your hands so you can pick up the gas pump.  I really wonder how many times I could’ve died in the US without this (sarcasm intended).  The second thing you do is push the button for type of gas.  In our case, it’s the under the #1, and the red label for “regular”.  You must be careful not to press the green one, because that’s heating oil.   Yup, kerosene or something for your house heater…  Then the bottom middle grid of buttons needs pressing.  Left is full tank, or you can have any permutation of liters, or yen price.

So, after pressing the right buttons (with the help of Yuka), I realize that wow, you can fill first and then pay in the office.  No credit card slots on the pump either.

Pumping gas in a K class car.  I think I need to be a dwarf.  There’s no clip to latch the gas pump on, so my “static free” hand needed to be there to hold the pump at all times.

Oma Maguro

In our trip to Aomori Prefecture 青森県, we immediately stopped by Oma 大間.  Oma is very well known for their tuna.  Diana and I both have to admit, this was the best tuna that we’ve ever had in our lives.  Yes, in our whole life.   It was a detour from our ryokan/hotel in Oirase, but well worth the trip.  Oirase is a 4ish hour drive south of Oma.

The rental car people recommended a place to us in Oma.  This store is has it’s own ship and is named after it’s own ship.

We ordered the special seafood bowl containing maguro (tuna), uni (sea urchin) and ikura (salmon roe).  Our friend, Yuka talked them into substituting what was supposed to be ika (squid) as ikura.  We definitely got our money’s worth here.  Ikura is a specialty 名物 of Hokkaido (northern island of Japan), but we’re so close to Hokkaido, that we knew it was gonna be good.

Everything in that bowl was legendary, yup legendary.  The uni was so fresh, it was just like having a fresh taste of the ocean.  The ikura had tougher skin than typical ikura, but you could easily taste the freshness.

The pieces of maguro in the bowl were huge!

We also ordered some otoro 大トロ, which means the highest fatty tuna.  The pieces were huge and extremely thick.  Basically, the size would pretty much fill your mouth.  The tuna basically just melted in my mouth.  So great.  It was so worth the trip.

During our meal, the owner or store manager kept showing us pictures of their largest tuna catch, and some magazine articles describing the store.  One of the articles is in the Japanese playboy.  True to the playboy journalistic style… the magazine was mostly articles for men, and less pictures.  Hence, Yuka was enjoying it.  haha.

So, Oma sits on the most northern point of Honshu.  We took a photo to say that we’ve been here.

And, we took a picture of Hokkaido in the distance.  Yup, you can see Hokkaido from here.

Aomori, Hirosaki, Apple fun!

Our friend Yuka invited us to go on a trip to north japan (yes, Tohoku 東北 region, but more north) to do a ryokan stay in the mountains near Lake Towada 十和田湖 in north Japan.  We took a ton of pictures on the trip, so I’ll split this trip into a few posts.  We could’ve picked many places to end up on the shinkansen, high speed rail, but we decided to go all the way up to Aomori 青森.

Aomori is near the top of the island of the main island of Honshu.  The whole prefecture was known for their apples.  So, immediately on arrival at the rental car place, we got cans of apple juice.

The cans have ratings for sweetness 甘味 and acidity 酸味.  This can was 3/5 3/5 and tasted great!

It wasn’t apple season, which starts in October, but there was still plenty of apple pies to go and see.

An example description of the apple pie.  There’s the sweetness 甘味, tartness/acidity 酸味, texture 食感, and cinnamon シナモン ratings.  Not many pies had as much cinnamon as the US style.  Most of the pies are on pastry dough, so it was a little bit more like a danish, than a real pie.  All being said, they were still quite delish.

There’s so many pies!

The red pin map below has every single place that was listed in the guide for Hirosaki city.  In the trip we ended up visiting about 4 of the places, but only 3 of them yielded apple pies.  We lucked out for one, because they make it fresh, so we had a 30 min lunch while waiting for the pies.

During the middle of our trip, we kept coming up on many places with apple vinegar リンゴ酢 drinks.  I guess it’s popular to make this when the apples are out of season.  Basically you get some of this vinegar liquid and have it with milk, soda etc.  Most people have it with soda 炭酸.   There were 2 apple favors, so I had the fuji apple flavor.

This is a blueberry flavor with soda pictured here.  I kinda forgot to take a picture of mine, but you get the hint.

One of the apple pies that we ate.  Sorry, no pictures of the other ones, because we ate them too fast!

Used clothing bingo

Some signs never make sense to me.