Tag: Japan
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Sapporo Diaries: The 73rd Snow Festival
Picking up after the last post left off, is my post about my first time at Sapporo’s Snow Festival! We timed our Korea trip so we would come back right when the festival would start and not have to make a separate trip to Sapporo. We booked a hotel for the weekend, and although originally…
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Japan Doesn’t Have Napkins
Okay, well, the title is a bit of clickbait, obviously. At first, I was going to compile a list of “culture-shocks” / culture differences as an American living in Japan, but that list would have to be updated, and thought about before I go about posting it, so I decided to just write individual posts…
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Sapporo/Noboribetsu Diaries: A Private Onsen Experience
On January 14 and 15, my boyfriend and I took a brief weekend getaway, sponsored by my parents as their Christmas gift to us this year, to Noboribetsu, a city in Hokkaido known for their onsen. Since I’m in Hokkaido, and I guess in Japan in general, I’ve been as wanting to go to an…
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Deskwarming: an ALT Staple
Most ALTs will experience a phenomenon called “deskwarming” at some point in their career, but to different degrees. Deskwarming is essentially when you’re required to go to work (mostly because Japanese contracts are stiff), even though you may not actually have anything to do, so you either have to sit there or keep yourself killing…
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Otaru/Sapporo Diaries: Experiencing Japanese New Year
Happy New Year! I got January 2-5th off (but not the 6th…) free without needing to use any paid time off (and the 9th ends up being another holiday, ha!), and though I was originally thinking of going home for a holidays when I first came, Christmas and New Year’s, since my boyfriend is here,…
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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!),…
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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,…
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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…