ダニエルの冒険

Today I once again donned my Frying Gloves and followed Niall’s recipe for beef burgers and they turned out great! Before I left Ireland, my grandma told me “you can do anything you put your mind to” and she was right in this instance anyway! After I went for Yakiniku with Hiroshi, I realised how ridiculously easy cooking meat is: all you’re doing is heating it up and then it’s ready to be shovelled into your mouth.

I went to get the ingredients as soon as I was out of school. First it took me a few minutes to identify an onion (that’s how little I eat them) but I found some and while looking for some pepper I found a packet made for burgers: salt, pepper, nutmeg, old spice, and all that other mother jazz. I couldn’t get beef mince but I found one that was “50% cow, 50% pig” so went with that. About 250g, as I was instructed. I chopped up half an onion, as I’ve seen friends do before while cooking for me, and went to work on it. The first burger didn’t look to be in great shape but turned out really well. The second looked perfect, but I ended up finishing it in quarters, as it was never done inside when I checked. The supermarket didn’t have any buns so I just ate them as “burgers” and not “hamburgers”. There’s a distinction in Japanese: the latter has buns and the former is just the meat. I asked a young man working in the supermarket about the buns and he looked for them, and then gave me a deep, long bow and said in the most polite way possible “They don’t seem to be here. There’s no excuse for this” 「申し訳ございません」. A less direct translation is “I’m really very sorry”.

2 delicious burgers and lots of cleaning up later, I decided to go back to the mall again (Wing Town) to try to find some uwabaki (上履き, indoor shoes) as sometimes it’s too cold for just socks here, but the enormous shoe shop didn’t have any, which got me another big bow, but no shoes. I’ve seen them up in Aeon though so I’ll head up there some time this week.

While at Wing Town I wandered into the book/CD/DVD/game shop as I always do when I’m there and ended up walking out with 2 purchases. I guess I’m working backwards through the alphabet with Japanese music. I bought a CD by YUI when I was here in the summer, and today I bought CDs by The Yellow Monkey (¥4890) and Yellow Magic Orchestra (¥3150). It’s going to be hard to bring myself to open the Yellow Monkey one — just like everything here it’s wrapped beautifully.

Everything’s about presentation here and I love it. One of my favourite things about shopping here is that they give you your money back notes first, all orientated correctly. In Ireland they dump all the change and your receipt into your hand with the notes and I usually have to stumble out of the shop or hang around at the counter sorting it out. Here, I get the notes, all orientated in the same way, put them into my wallet, put my wallet back into my pocket, and they get handed the coins and receipt, which go into my jacket pocket. All the notes being orientated correctly is good for 2 reasons. First, since the notes here are all quite similar, having the numbers all in one corner helps when you’re trying to pull out a 5000 yen note out of ten notes and second, even in Ireland I like all my notes to be facing the right way, the right way up, in descending order (or ascending, depending on how you look at it). When they give you back your purchases in a bag, they seal the bag with some tape and hand you the bag by the handle with both hands, so you can just slip in your hand and walk away with it. Here’s how it works here:

1. Sales assistant says “いらっしゃいませ” (irasshaimase, “welcome”). I respond with good morning (おはようございます, ohayo gozaimasu), hello (こんにちは, konnichiwa) or good evening (こんばんは, konbanwa).
2. Customer brings items to counter.
3. Sales assistant tots up the items and reads out the price on the display, showing it to you. I’ve been asked “is this ok?” sometimes. The first time this happened I didn’t know what they were asking because it was so strange for me.
4. Customer puts money into a small tray.
5. Sales assistant counts the money and says, again in polite language, “I’ll take charge of your ?? yen”.
6. Depending on what I’m buying, here I’m often asked about the packaging. Sometimes they’ll say “is it ok like this?”, asking if I want more bags or whatever. I always just say “yes”.
7. Sales assistant puts items into a bag, seals it with tape, and holds the bag out by the hand hole ready for the customer to put your hand in and take it.
8. When the customer takes it, the sales assistant takes a somewhat deep bow and says “thank you very much”, sometimes with a “please come again” thrown in there.

Every day I find myself saying to myself “I love this country” when I experience the quality of service like this, see adorable kids talking to each other or to their parents in Japanese, see girls walking around in clothes that are ridiculously undersized for the current weather, or find a shop full of things, any one of which I would have killed for while living in Ireland (CDs, figurines, DVDs, comics, technology, and so on).