Thomas, Andreas… this one’s for you and your crazy hawaiiannesses.
Red bean kitkat is better than red bean soup kitkat. It at least tastes really true to what it’s supposed to be.
If anything was going to be the national dessert flavour, it might just be azuki.
Meh. I mean, it’s fine. I kind of like it, but I’d still rather have my brown-desserts be chocolate. Why can’t I move to a place where the national dessert is caramel? Like Argentina!! Yes – Okay. It’s settled. We will build a naval base in Argentina, station an aircraft carrier there, jon will get transferred, and then i will eat dulce de leche candy until i puke.
I currently live in a glorious land, where artificial flavouring is harnessed to its full potential to produce junk-food that of legends are made of. This land or lore is full of inspiring flavor combinations, and of general awesomeness among kitkats. This… well, this next kitkat isn’t any of that. Sad, too, because it had so much potential.
Without further ado, I give you jon’s find of the day; the chalky, bile coloured, wasabi kitkat:
Perhaps I have too high of expectations, especially after that gem (Sakura Coffee) from a couple days ago. Remember when we visited the wasabi farm last year? I got the wasabi ice cream, expecting it to be spicy-yet-cool-and-sweet, and ended up with a creamy mess of chalky goo in my mouth. Sigh. Will I never learn?
I know I’ve been hitting you with a lot of lame kitkat posts lately, and you’re probably wondering when the stories will perk up. Fair enough. In all honesty, work’s been kind of busy as of late, and I’m freaking out a little in my head. As Elizabeth would put it, “all I have to talk about is Invisalign® and shoes”. (okay, not the shoes, but you get the point.) Point being, I hear you. I’ll stop moping about and have some adventures soon enough.
After lunch, we headed over to the main event for the day: the mochifest. One of the ways the Japanese celebrate the New Year is by getting a big group of people together and pounding the heck out of some rice until it turns into a sticky otherworldly substance called mochi. This is often topped with bean paste. Sometimes they stick ice cream inside and roll it into happy little dessert balls.
Turn your head sideways here. I dont know how to rotate the video:
After the rice was good and done, they fed it to you! Lines of people queued up.
This was a volunteer dishing it out (you can see the purple bean-paste on the left. they just kind of… smeared it on):
I think the mochi-pounders got tuckered out, because after a while there was a boy-scout-like drum ceremony…
…and they let little kids take part in the mashin’
While we were standing in line, a very persistent Japanese woman started talking to us. I want to emphasize that she didn’t speak a lick of English and we tried to make it very clear that we didn’t understand a word she was saying. She hung out with us for about a half hour, until someone around us helped translate and told us that she was inviting us to an International Students party. More mochi, she says. She was crazy, but very nice. We think.
On our way back to the train station, I found some roasted sweet potato flavoured kitkats. Boy, these were tasty. I hate it when they put them in a bag with 4 flavoured and 4 regular though – who wants boring old regular when you have the option of SWEET POTATO!?
We had some time to kill before heading over to dinner, so we stopped in Shinjuku to check out the Tokyo Government Tower.
This is SUCH a find. First, it’s free. Second, there’s an observation deck on the 45th floor of the building. What a cool view!
Will noticed that the cafe served beers at really reasonable prices. ($6 for a beer. I say this is reasonable, because that’s the price of beer on the 1st floor – they could have easily added us a lofty surcharge.) After being out-and-about for 8 hours, we were ready to sit down and take a break.
Also, this is where we started drinking for the day. One beer at 5pm on a school night doesn’t seem like a bad idea, right? That is, until you start following it by roadies. What’s that? You’re not familiar with the roadie? It may still be frowned upon, but strictly speaking, it’s not illegal to drink while you’re walking down the street. So we did. It’s important to exercise the rights that you have abroad, that you can’t take advantage of back home! This stuff below was like grapefruit juice with a punch in the face. And it only has 45 calories! It’s basically healthy!
Time for dinner. We were meeting our friends Brian & Emi at one of Emi’s favourite restaurants in Shibuya. I can’t tell you how awesome it is to have a Japanese friend that will order for you.
Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that she’s a really nice person! More sake. Wait, didn’t i say this was a school night? oh boy. (that’s brian and emi in the background)
The night ended with me falling over and nearly murdering jon. No, really. He’s okay, but for a few seconds as I was laying on the floor, watching him fall down a flight of concrete stairs, I thought about how terrible it would be to not have a husband anymore. I suck!
The kitkat company here seems to love strawberry and strawberry variations. Maybe it’s just a really likable flavour. Maybe it’s because winter is strawberry season here. Anyways, today I have for you:
Sparkling Strawberry.
It’s has a bit of a lemon tang at the very end. I’m not really sure what sparkles taste like, but it must be citrus.
