Grocery Shopping

Day 5

The first time I went grocery shopping was to a place under the subway station. Tim says there are bigger and better grocery stores, so we decided to go to them on Saturday. Since we don't have a car in Tokyo, we grabbed our backpacks to carry the food back in.

Our first stop was National. This is a grocery store that caters to foreigners. It has many more english labels than the other store I went to. Compared to an American grocery store, it is still tiny. It doesn't have all the prepared food stations that the grocery store under the subway had. It had about 5 aisles of food, one for produce, one for alcohol, one for cereals and dried foods, one for refrigerated items, and one for snacks like crackers and chips. The carts are small. After we had put about half the list in the cart, we decided going to another grocery store was not going to work out. So we just finished shopping at national. All the food didn't fit into our two backpacks. Moral of this story: It is impossible to grocery shop in Japan like you do in America. You cannot have a full refrigerator. You cannot meal plan for an entire week. Basically, the Japanese go shopping every day or every other day. You just buy the food you want for that immediate meal, and don't ever have alot of food hanging around. I guess the benefit of this model is that if you want a snack, you have to walk to the store to buy it, which might make you reconsider. In this case, we survived the trip by taking a taxi.

By the way, when I say "all of the food", I meant some yogurt and cereal for breakfast, some cheese and crackers and fruit for snacks, and three dinners.... a shrimp pasta for sunday where we only needed some tomatoes, a chicken sandwich we will make on tuesday, and a greek pasta salad for thursday.

Japan is expensive. This glares at you when you see 5 apples cost $9. When you think about buying some cherries, but a fistful is $24. The best rule of thumb in Japan is if it costs twice as much as America, then it is normal.

Once we got home, we were hot and tired, so Tim made delicious smoothies. Luckily he had been to costco and had some frozen strawberries.



For dinner we ate McDonalds. I did not want to admit this on my blog. The reason is because I don't eat McDonalds in the US. I am a Wendy's or Chick Filet person if I am doing fast food. But McDonalds (or Maku-do-na-ru-do) in Japan is different. The Japanese are very quality oriented, so the big mac looks exactly like the picture and it tasted pretty good.