Gaijin • Tokyo • Undergound

New bread scanning register in Japan!

I stopped by the bakery located within Nakano station ( I wanted bread items for dinner, and I don't have to pay extra for leaving the station). I basically have stopped by here once a week for the last month and a half. Today, to my surprise at the register was this strange board of light. It looked similar to what artist used

as a light board for drawing. 

At first I thought what is this, then the display panel my right shows the tray of food products I wanted to eat immediately. The panel then highlighted the shapes of the items and priced them accordingly. 

I have been living in Japan for over 5 and a half years. In this time I think everyone I know has been on Japanese tv for one reason or another. But still in all this time I had never been approached, until now! I finally (maybe) will get my 5 seconds of foreigner glory to be on tv! The show is called sekaibanzuku and it usually features foreigners who are asked questions about Japan and their own country. We were asked to reply in Japanese, so I did my best ask to I'm still hey shakey at best.

Some of the questions I was able to answer unaided but a few I had to turn to my friend for the simplified version of the question in English. At that point I was able to answer in Japanese. Some of the topics were, how are the train systems in your home city, how do the compare to Japan. Compare doctors in Japan and ones home country and finally, the most importantant one of all... Which is your favorite type of ramen.

So to potentially see me on tv check out the Japanese site http://www.ntv.co.jp/banduke/ if I can get the video I'll eventually post it.

Limited edition cola float soda. 

I'm always excited to try limited edition unique flavored  drinks and with each season change comes those drinks.

I very much love my ice creams floats, as they are also commonly found on family restaurants or karaoke drink menus. As per my usuall purchase of special drinks I took this one home with high expectations. This company had previously released some really good special flavored drinks, such as the sakuranbo (cherry) soda. 

When I opened this bottle you could smell a creamy flavor to the soda, which if it's a float I would hope had the smell. The smell was just right, not to powerful and natural (enough). 

Now for the taste, the first gulp seemed a tad sweet, but after seemed to become neutral. For the cola float flavor, it came out not bad but not good. It was a very non-memorable drinking experience. I was hoping for more of a creamy icecream tast but it wasn't there. Other float style sodas like the 'melon' float were quite tasty. For this cola float soda, if it were a take it or leave it, I'd just leave it.