Category: Japanese culture

Categories
#foodie Japan Japanese culture Japanese food

Matcha Latte and a Danish.


Caffe Veloce in Tachikawa; for only the past couple of days, I have passed by this little caffe a few times to and from the station. After visiting some old haunts in Harajuku/Shibuya today, I decided to stop into Caffe Veloce and have myself a small treat and a drink.

This was my first time trying green tea/”matcha” latte in Japan. I’m sure the drink was around when I was in Japan two years ago, but I guess I didn’t take much interest in any tea drinks back then. Tasting the latte was a new experience for me; it tasted just like authentic green tea, with a hint of cream and milk. A little strong for any other Westerner, but I personally liked the taste.

The danish was standard, nothing special. Maybe a little less sweet than its Western counterparts. The Japanese are known to have milder flavors of a lot of Western foods/sweets, which I actually prefer a lot more. I don’t feel like I am getting diabetes from eating a Japanese sweet; when I eat sweets in the US, I sometimes feel like I may have to go to the hospital from the extreme sugar rush. Okay, perhaps that’s just an exaggeration, but I can’t help it when I say that most sweets/desserts in the US are TOO sweet for my liking.

Categories
Japan Japanese culture Japanese language travel

First step off the plane.

Arriving in Tokyo in the late afternoon/early afternoon, my sense of time has been altered a bit. Coming back to this city, this city that used to be my home for four months, feels so strange. A mild culture shock hits me as I try to re-grasp my knowledge of the Japanese language for the day.

It feels strange arriving alone, without someone to welcome me. This happened last time as well, but at least with last time, I was welcomed to Japan by a student helper from my exchange school. Perhaps that time was scarier because I knew little to no conversational Japanese; this time, at least I had more knowledge of Japanese and could somewhat get around.

Yet, it is all overwhelming to go back to a country and try to get used to the way of life, the language again.

(Note: for the remaining entries of my trip, I shall be posting pictures of my meals as a sort of photo documentary. Food is always an interesting thing to look at, right?)

Categories
American Culture Business Musings Japanese culture

Otetsudai: Japan’s answer to finding temps, stat!

I just read an article in BusinessWeek about how in Japan they have a GPS-enabled system called “Otetsudai” where they track down available job hunters within a certain vicinity for temp-hiring with jobs that need workers as soon as possible.

Basically, job seekers use their cellphones and log onto the Otetsudai website to indicate their availability at a given time. This in turn sends out a signal to the GPS servers about the availability of workers in a given area.

This sounds like a really great program and I kind of wish the US was advanced enough with mobile Internet right now to have a similar program. I know sometimes I am out just wandering San Francisco but I would be willing to work at any moment. It’d be nice to be on-call like that, especially if I know I have the time to spare. Too bad mobile Internet browsing is still rather limited due to service providers charging the service to customers. Not enough people really do mobile browsing here as compared in Japan, where it has been around forever. Plus, so far it seems like a lot of phones here in the US are not yet GPS-capable, which is another big difference between US and Japanese phones.

I remember when I was in Japan a few years ago for studying abroad, I got a cellphone with au KDDI. I didn’t really know how to use my phone, but then one of my Japanese friends showed me how we could use GPS on my phone for free. Now, remember, this was two years ago. Two years ago, here in the US, GPS was only really becoming known by most consumers. Even then, I don’t think GPS was available on cellphones just yet.

My oh my, the Japanese continue to amaze me.