Groceries Randomness

Found a couple of random things on a typical trip to the groceries and decided to take pictures of them to show you ^.^ The neighborhood groceries store is a 15-20 minutes walk from our apartment, and yes, we carry all our groceries by hand, which is a pain, but I guess we're getting [forced] some exercise so it's okay xD Plus it's just me and hubby, and the fridge is a college dorm size anyway, so it's not like we can buy a giant cart full even if we want to. That said, somehow we always end up with 3 giant and heavy bags, which fills our mini fridge to the brim and keep us fed for a week :P 

The Yokohama manhole cover is actually really cool looking!

This is the ubiquitous "neko bus", which is not the Totoro-esque neko bus but rather a Kuro Neko (literally "black cat") delivery truck, which I call neko bus ^.^ At home in the US of A, we have the ubiquitous UPS or FedEx, in Japan, you have the neko bus. And they deliver as late at 8PM as well as on Saturday and Sunday. Nuts? Yep. Totally nuts. They're just everywhere all the time.

And you think only magazines come with freebies in Japan? Nope ^.^ Drinks here frequently come with a fun toy for kids or a cell phone charm for everyone else. 

Here's an Anpanman toy on bottles of orange juice.

And a Pokemon toy charm on...guess what...

Pepsi Zero! Totally weird, because it's not a kid's drink at all, and to think an adult would buy this drink for a Pokemon toy... Hmm...then again, it's Japan and anything is fair game.

I love going grocery shopping in Japan and I hate it. I love it for all the nicely cut meat and fish, and I hate it for the price. However, occasionally, they'll have amazing deals with meat and fish.

Take these beautifully displayed mackerel pikes (sanma) for example, you have a choice of uncut whole fish (left column), uncut but cleaned (lower right), and cut and cleaned (upper left) for only 99yen (~$1.20) each!