Moving to a city, rather than visiting a city as a tourist, means satisfaction at the end of a day comes from very different directions, especially if a reasonable budge is a concern! (For example, a good day is a day in which we find Bob’s Red Mill oatmeal!) Consequently, much of our time in Tokyo as new residents thus far has been spent scouting out what’s available for purchase. This is a significant change of direction for us as both David and I, over the years, have come to dislike shopping, especially grocery shopping. Our dislike with shopping was most likely strongly influenced by the lack of exciting shopping in Galesburg, Illinois, our home for the past seven years. (In Galesburg, our favorite two stores were Big Lots and the local health food/grocery store, so you can see what I mean.)
One of the draws to grocery stores particularly in Tokyo has been the learning they offer with little intimidation. We can pick up packages to decipher ingredients, stare at shelves taking in as much as we can, or search for a particular item without anyone paying much attention to us. The fact that we can’t communicate in Japanese with fellow customers or clerks is not an issue as we search the shelves and labels. And if we don’t buy much, we don’t spend much!
A second draw is the sharp learning curve (despite our lack of skills in Japanese). There is so much stuff that we do not recognize! Many of the vegetables are ones we are familiar with, but there are also many that are unfamiliar. And even the familiar ones are small! We have seen egg plants that were much smaller than small chicken eggs. There are lots of prepared foods available deli style that we have never seen before, and the prepared foods look more similar than they ever seemed to look in the US. Being able to read the printed words in our native language helps us out even if we aren’t aware of it. For example, I never realized how difficult it was to discriminate in a grocery store between rice wine, rice vinegar, apple cider vinegar and all those other bottles that look like they have the same liquid in them! We spent several minutes just searching for apple cider vinegar. I was about to give up until David saw a bottle with apples on it! Ah satisfaction comes in simple ways.
A third draw to shopping has been our search to find items familiar to us at reasonable prices. In part, we want to find things that our students from the US might want to find, so we’ll have the information to share. However, we also just want to eat things such as peanut butter without salt and sugar in it, oatmeal, and tasty, nutritious bread—all things that are not readily available in Tokyo. After two weeks, we had managed to find (with the help of Google searches!) just about everything we have imagined we might want EXCEPT popcorn. Although David doesn’t eat much popcorn, I love it, and eat it regularly in the US. We searched, and searched, and searched but only found the pre-popped stuff. Then low and behold, a few days ago, David discovered it at a Can-Do 100-yen shop! It comes in a very small package and is yellow (I much prefer white popcorn), but it pops and is readily available since the 100-yen shops are not that hard to find. Now that we have popcorn, I am not sure we will have a focus to our days!
Actually, David found a new grocery store in our neighborhood yesterday. It is the largest one we have been in yet, and it has lots of hard-to-find items (for a price, of course). The most exciting thing about this grocery store is that they make kappa maki and other vegetable shushi rolls! And it is only 10 minutes from our home. It seems like nearly everything can be found within a 10 minute walk from our home in Tokyo! That’s a bit different from Galesburg!