Category: Blog
Navigating Everyday Food in Japan
I love Japanese food, and I love the way Japan has treated foreign food (ex: Japanese Italian food is amazing). Now, as a tourist, you really want to go out and eat all the good food you can, which ranges from the super touristy well-known spots and famous sushi and ramen (significantly cheaper than America!),…
Sapporo Diaries: Pancakes and (Not!) Izakayas
We were going to go out this weekend to Sapporo mainly to do some winter-ish shopping, particularly for my boyfriend who needed to get some snow boots. He ended up getting boots locally in town, so it turned into more of a food day (which was already planned anyway), plus some spontaneous shopping, some needs,…
A Newfound Appreciation for Japanese Teishoku
The other day when I was ordering and eating at a local restaurant, I recently realized that I found comfort and a sense of normalcy in Japanese teishoku meals. What’s teishoku? Teishoku (定食) is essentially a Japanese “set meal” supposed to reflect what Japanese people traditionally eat with nutritional balance. A normal set would have…
Otaru Diaries: Walking Along the Canal on a Rainy Day
My birthday was a couple weeks ago, and one of my new friends here, who has a birthday close to mine, wanted to plan a party celebration of sorts on November 19, the weekend closest to my birthday, since mine was on a weekday. According to the weather, it was going to just be cloudy,…
Sapporo Diaries: Chatting with Strangers, Sweets Galore, and Early Christmas Shopping?
Here’s the next edition of a new series I’m dubbing Sapporo Diaries, because whenever I go out it’s really a Sapporo day trip. I really should explore more of the smaller cities or even Otaru, the next big city over, but Sapporo just has that big city vibe that nothing else really has, plus all…
Sapporo Diaries: Beef Tongue, Retro Window Shopping, and Winter Prep-ish
A few weeks ago, specifically October 16, I went out to Sapporo to get out of my place, eat some good food and do some shopping. It was honestly mostly centered around Sapporo station, but really, Sapporo station itself is endless and there’s already plenty to do there anyway. I might have mentioned this previously,…
An Unexpected Japanese Cultural Difference
I don’t mean to be the priviledged foreigner in a foreign country, but one of the most unexpected things I now certainly believe I took for granted was the keyboard. Yes. The keyboard. Now, you may be wondering, is this really a big deal? In the grand scheme of things, no, not really, but as…
(My) School Life as an Elementary School ALT on the JET Program
The JET Program’s motto is “Every Situation is Different”, or ESID for short. Basically, no one is ever going to have the same experience, so it’s hard to generalize the whole experience to someone. Some of my friends are T1s (Teacher 1, aka primary teacher, doing lesson planning, despite having “Assistant” in our working title),…
My Experience Traveling to Japan During Covid (July 2022)
I essentially started preparing my leave from America to Japan around June-July, left July 23 from Los Angeles, and arrived in Narita Airport on the 24th. (I would have recorded as much as the process as I could, since I tend to forget things and I really wanted to write down what I could, but…